UPDATE: In 2026, a brand new iteration of the “Push Button Performer” (25.2) will revive this performance at sites around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest with all new content and instrumentation. Stay tuned!
Do you like getting pushed around? Apparently Mike does. Because since 1999, Mike has been his audience’s dutiful puppet as the “Push Button Performer”: a live, audience-directed performance piece busked and presented nearly 40 times in classrooms, carnivals, street festivals, theaters and art galleries. After a 20+ year hiatus, this performance piece is being revived and re-crafted as robot satire. All apologies. This is only cold comfort for button-pushing humans living in a world where the line between machines and real people gets blurrier everyday.
PBP 25.2
With an amateur repertoire of spoken word and non-sensical music playing, The PBP is a live performance directed purely by the audience - to stop and start, go faster or slower, or get louder or quieter. The PBP is often left frozen for great lengths of time, waiting for a button to be pushed. Someone pushes “play”, and the barrier between “performer” and “audience” is broken. Then the roles reverse. An audience member’s performance becomes the bit of entertaining content to watch.
Invariably, young boys and men make The PBP go fast and loud. During the vaudeville-esque performance’s original run from 1999 to 2005, one audience member at a theater venue once made The PBP go so uncomfortably fast and loud that the rest of the audience turned on him. Two large men had to physically peal this larger gentlemen away from The PBP’s chest panel. When they did, the audience erupted in joyful applause, grateful that the “mean” man who made The PBP go “too” fast and loud was finally gone and the “show” could go on.
