My latest full-length show, WOW+FLUTTER finished a sold-out run at the incomparably fantastic LIC venue The Chocolate Factory Theater in February.  I’ve been compiling the documentation and will be continually posting and updating things here.  In the mean time, Claudia La Rocco wrote a review of WOW+FLUTTER in the New York Times.  Here it is:

photo: Robert Caplin for The New York Times

The distinctive shaftway connecting the two levels of the Chocolate Factory in Queens is the theatrical gift that keeps on giving. It’s only a matter of time until some enterprising artist eschews this Long Island City theater’s larger stages and makes an entire show in the confines of that brick-lined space.

Last Friday night, Andrew Schneider climbed, slid and threw himself out of (and sometimes down) the passageway during his new evening-length solo, “Wow + Flutter.” He was all over the place — literally and metaphorically — using a harness, interactive projections and custom-built, wearable electronics. Gadgets, almost nonstop babble on themes both esoteric and mundane, numerous pop-culture images and even a brief Michael Jackson dance created a sort of technological id, governed by, to take Mr. Schneider’s words slightly out of context, his “internal head speed.”

The audience was pressed against this id, since Mr. Schneider chose to place the stage area lengthwise in the narrow, white rectangular room. In this he evoked another technologically minded artist, John Jesurun, who last fall at the Chocolate Factory used the same spatial configuration and different multimedia smoke and mirrors to create a hauntingly claustrophobic experience.

Mr. Jesurun, of course, has been at this game for decades. By comparison, Mr. Schneider, who does multimedia and video work with both the Wooster Group and Fischerspooner, is just getting going. He is an engaging performer, but “Wow + Flutter,” which suffered from a self-consciously labored script, didn’t quite live up to the promise of an immersive, altered experience.

Still, there were nice touches throughout. Christine Shallenberg’s lighting included assaultive bursts, cool blues that flooded the space as if it were under water, and sleek, white tubing affixed to columns and facing Mr. Schneider. Grainy black-and-white video periodically gave glimpses of activity in the downstairs space, including ghostly dances. Kate Valk’s lips, via one of two video monitors hanging from the ceiling, had a sultry, sometimes creepy cameo as “This Girl,” the remote object of Mr. Schneider’s distracted, self-involved affection.

Mr. Schneider used scientific riffs, Omar Zubair’s live sound effects and a barrage of spliced video (often controlled by his muscular gestures, like sharp air punches done while wearing electronic-enhanced gloves) to hold forth on time, space and experience after death. Yet he kept returning to a quieter meditation on masculinity and the desperate need for attention. Beneath all the wow and flutter of this boy and his toys is the naked need to please.

The Wooster Group‘s North Atlantic is running this weekend and next at the REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles.  It’s a great show, and I was lucky enough to get to rehearse as “Lud” for the month that we were in rehearsals at the Garage in SoHo, while Scott Shepherd was in a run of Gatz in Cambridge with ERS.  I was able to get out there this weekend to shoot the show for our archive, and was really finally able to experience the show for the first time as a pseudo-audience member.  The show is mind-blowing.  A reminder not only of why I’ve always wanted to work with this company, but why I became involved in theatre in the first place.  Really visceral, inspiring stuff.  Go see it.

photo: Paula Court

Grab tickets for the LA run here.

TWG will bring NA to NYC in March and April for a run at the newly renovated Jerome Robbin’s Theatre inside the Baryshnikov Art’s Center.  Buy those Tickets here.

Do not miss this!

I’m very excited to announce the opening of a new piece in February at The Chocolate Factory.  I’m currently in further development of a piece called WOW AND FLUTTER.  You may have seen work-in-progress showings at Issue Project Room last April.  Well, the show is back, and it’s still different.  From the press release:

When everything, all information is all accessible, and all at the same time and all simultaneously; order, ordinance does not matter. Linear time as we know it is indifferent. Things poke holes in the present moment from other places. The whole of everything is now in one frame. Everything at once. All the time. Flattened out. With a meat tenderizer.

Click here to watch an early excerpt from WOW AND FLUTTER.

The Chocolate Factory is awesome.COME!  

To purchase lots of tickets, (or just one), click here.

Last week I was fortunate enough to be able to get out of the city and up to the artsy air of Adams, Massachusetts.  The curators at Greylock Arts gallery asked me to give a performance as part of their artist salon and in conjunction with their previous exhibit, Wearable Expressions – “a group exhibition of wearable art, accessories, and technology apparel exploring fashion as a means for individuals to dynamically express themselves.”  I had a great time performing and the local audience was absolutely amazing.  I wish I had audiences like this in Brooklyn.  Maybe my demographic has shifted to the over 50 set.  An edit from the gallery is below.

Thanks to Andy Jordan at The Wall Street Journal for doing this nice piece about some of my technologically augmented performance stuff.

A big thanks to everyone who helped make this happen including Kate Hartman (pictured in the poster-frame image), The Wooster Group for use of their space, and Andy Jordan of The Wall Street Journal.

Also covered by:

BoingBoing
Make: Blog
nycresistor

And here’s the YouTube video
And here’s the Dance-Tech.net video

Tell your friends!

I totally lied and did not come through with posting CHN01′s progress.  We all know how it goes.  Too busy making the thing to remember to remember how we’re making it.  Anyway, now’s your chance to come see what I’ve not been releasing early and often.  I’ve got a performance coming up tonight!  Here’s some excerpts (from rehearsal) on video!  You should(‘ve) come!  I was part of the “interactive art” night so there were tons of great performances lined up throughout the night.

- click to play -

I showed a work-in-progess piece called “CHN01″ which is more or less “PLEASEURE” again.  I used a bunch of the EDP set.

Artist Michael Arthur was at the festival all weekend and made some beautiful drawings of some of the artists.  I’m honored that he was able to sketch some of CHN01.

Ignite NYC II: Energy, Cupcakes, and Alley vs. Valley is happening Monday, September 15th at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street).  I’ll be cramming Experimental Devices for Performance into a rapid-fire ride-’em-and-eat-’em log-roller jamboree of a presentation.  What is Ignite?  From the site,

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.

Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Media is heading this up.  He writes on the O’Reilly Radar blog, “We are a guest of the New York Television Festival. They are providing us a ~400 person theatre and free beer (during the cupcake contest).”

The presenter line-up looks pretty dope:

Krikorian Raffi - holmz : open database for energy consumption
Deb Schultz – Alley vs Valley
Jennifer Pahlka – Technology Anxiety: Jello and Web 3.0
Sam Lessin – A very brief history of privacy in our data-deluged world
Nichelle Stephens – Cupcakes: The iPhone of Desserts
Don Carli – The Carbon Footprint of Banner Ads, Emails and Websites and why you should care
Nate Westheimer – Magic at the Democratic National Convention
Andrew Schneider – Experimental Devices for Performance
Audacia Ray – Porn as a front runner in technology innovations… With a twist

I know that Kati London of team Botanicalls (the plants that call you on the phone when they need something project) will also be presenting.

Acting Stranger will hopefully screen in some form tomorrow at the Conflux Festival Headquarters in the Village.  I’ll plan on being there around 1:00PM and staying until around 3:00PM.  I’ll bring a couple pairs of headphones and some speakers, and most likely a slew of DVDs to hand out.

I’ve been able to shoot eleven new scenes this week, five of them just today.  I’m becoming more at ease the more I have these stranger experiences with the participants.  I have been too often worrying about lines, and making the other person comfortable, and hoping that they are in the frame of the shot.  It can be hard to let yourself go and just be present in the moment which is ideally what the project is all about.  Being there.  Letting yourself invest totally in someone who you have never seen nor spoken a word to.  I’m realizing a lot about the project as I go forward.  Conflux has turned out to be a good play ground for Acting Stranger.

All the recently uploaded scenes can be found on the new video page of acting stranger here.

Acting Stranger, the project that involves complete strangers acting out short and intense scenes with me, will be featured in the upcoming Conflux festival, which will take place all around NYC from September 11-14 (next weekend!).  You can signup directly at actingstranger.com or you can head down to festival HQ at the Center for Architecture in the Village (536 LaGuardia Place), where you can also check out these other psychogeographical projects from some of my friends:

• 802.11 Apparel – Wifi Jacket . Jenny Chowdhury
• Botanicalls: A Walking Tour of Manhattan Led by the Plants of New York . kati
• Self-Sustainable Chair . JooYoun
• Wildernets . Doris Cacoilo, Mouna Andraos & Sonali Sridhar

Even if you can’t participate in Acting Stranger because you’re familiar with me, tell your friends to start acting stranger.

I’ll be posting updates from the festival as they happen.

A week of Fischerspoonering distraction and I’m back on track as of yesterday with a new plan and an old script.

Pleaseure.

Amazingly, I seem to only have the script in hard copy, else I would post it here.  Here’s the idea.  Pleaseure + CHN01 + EDP.  I wrote this thing when I was in college.  It’s a performance piece that is written for a single performer.  The piece was only performed once in a theatre in Spanish Harlem by Michael Balsley, in its entirety and as it was written.  I’ve pulled various themes from it over the years to use in different pieces, especially a section called “BIG FAN”  which I’ve used specifically for dependent.study in Chicago with BPG and the New York Fringe Festival.

Last week I spent a bunch of time starting.  That’s always the hardest thing for me.  The start.  I shot video of my mouth  while reading There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury.  I didn’t know what to expect, but the results were not at all inspiring.  I ended up using some of the video for the Fischerspooner show in Italy.  Surprise, surprise I insert myself into their show when I can.  I was pondering my meager output from a whole Sunday session of autovideo, in the shower, the next morning, when various things lined up for me.

The structure of Pleaseure as a script

The physicality of the TwitchSet and the Performoshoes

The mask of the Prolixus

The constraint of the FaceMask

Let’s get these guys together.  I’ve tried something like this before, but now I would like to flesh it out completely.