SIGNS OF LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY

THE BROADER PICTURE

THEY'RE mysterious and faceless, these strangers, but they are also oddly familiar, as they ride the New York underground clasping cardboard cut-out handbags and briefcases, or, eerily, cavort amongst frolicking families on the beach. Are these men and women, with their silence and their robotic steps, making a statement about the anonymity of urban life, our cogs-in-a-wheel existences, reflecting ourselves as our own worst nightmare?

Something like that, yes.

"I'm a shadow of society," declares Yvette Helin, the 32-year-old costume designer who founded The Pedestrian Project five years ago. "Walking in New York, I began to feel like a mechanised product of city living: you walk a block, stop at a light, and repeat - it's very systematic; if you ignore the rules, you'll probably get run over. I started looking at the pedestrians on street-crossing signs, and I said, `I want to be that generic icon person.'"

So Helin, a transplanted Texan whose prior oeuvre had included life-size marionettes with heads made of cathode ray tubes, rigged up some geometric cones and cylinders out of polyester screen, covered them with matt black cotton and Lycra, and metamorphosed into a metaphor. The Pedestrians "make us aware of the dehumanising effect that society's rigid rules inflict on us," she explains. "People might not even be aware that they're in a system unless it's pointed out to them. The whole thing becomes very reflective of life in general. It's like a poem."

To get her message across, she and her band of five to eight "Peds" stroll the avenues in a disturbing, stopped-time motion (the choreography is directed by Helin through walkie-talkies concealed in the Peds' heads), and do the Ped Dance, a hypnotic, back-and-forth two-step. They have walked a plywood dog in the Easter Parade (one confused Schauzner kept sniffing it), enacted "Hold Children's Hands" signs on escalators with the aid of cut-out children, and frolicked at Wigstock, the annual downtown dragfest, with brilliantly coloured cones on their heads. And everywhere the Peds go, cameras follow. "Going out as a generic person gets us tons of attention," Helin says. "It's ironic. By deliberately becoming nobodies, the Pedestrians have become somebodies."

The only people that seem not to like them are small children, who tend to run screaming from them. Otherwise, even seen-it-all New Yorkers are intrigued. "They can't figure out what we're doing, and they stop in their tracks to wait for us to let them know," Helin says. She sometimes hands out cards reading: "We are pedestrians", or "I am you", or "I am every woman," but it's more fun to let onlookers guess. "A lot of people call us the bathroom people, because we look like the icons on bathroom signs," Helin says. Others have a different take: "I think this is supposed to be an important and incisive comment on bourgeoise life," one member of the bourgeoisie suggested at a recent outing.

Most New Yorkers are more light-hearted than that, but even their bonhomie cannot inoculate the Peds from the modern life they reflect. One time, a lunatic seized a prop gun and menaced them with it. Another time, a surly member of New York's finest told them that it was against the law to ride the subway with a concealed face. A more common response, however, is the straightforward: "Yo! Aliens!" !