Exquisite Corpse Company’s clever choose-your-own-adventure play has a handful of viewers peek in on a Brooklyn couple in really close quarters.
Material sourced from NYT piece By Maya Phillips May 6, 2021
We’re keeping this short and sweet in the interest of timely announcements. If you’re ready to get out there and rumble in the wild, do hit up Exquisite Corpse Company’s choose your own adventure style interactive performance, Zoetrope.
Starr Kirkland as Angel, with her hand in a fish tank that doubles as a window for a viewer looking in from outside. | Jess Dalene
Directed by Porcia Lewis and Tess Howsam, the performance is both a surreal diorama of the recent past and a voyeuristic experience. The set interior is a minuscule 12’x8’ trailer, with no traditional seating whatsoever — audience viewing options include “TV,” (a Truman style experience) “Time (a calendar),” “Portrait” and “Fish Tank.” These are the openings through which you examine protagonists’ Angel and Bae’s pandemic life.
The writers penned 12 different outcomes which are determined by yours and the audience choices.
From Exquisite Corpse Company website:
Two people, a fish, a New York City apartment on top of a trailer bed, and you. Exquisite Corpse Company is back with an interactive, immersive, and portable living diorama of 2020. Written by our writers in residence: Leah Barker, Emily Krause, and Elinor T Vanderburg, and co-directed by Porcia Lewis and ECC's Artistic Director, Tess Howsam, Zoetrope will be on the streets, literally, of Brooklyn and beyond with socially distanced seating for a limited and lucky audience, May 1 - May 23.
The mission of this project is to use our shared experiences as a nation and as individuals, to create an interactive performance that offers reflective healing and generative dialogue as we continue to process 2020 in 2021. Linking moments of connection and loneliness, with a surrealist twist, this mobile piece presents an accessible (Covid-19 conscious) platform for people across the New York City boroughs and state lines.
Over the course of 35 minutes, the audience experiences an interactive, COVID-19 safe, live performance, and plays a role in dictating the way the story plays out. The project aims to explore interactivity and intimacy in a time of isolation. Functioning like a traveling peep-show, audience members peer inside a living room that is equal parts familiar and absurd as they experience a living room drama unlike any they’ve seen before.
Uh … yes to voyeurism?
Zoetrope
Through May 23 at 134 Vanderbilt Ave Brooklyn, N.Y.; exquisitecorpsecompany.com
Performance notes: suitable for audiences 18+ years old, strobe is used throughout the performance, performance is heard through headphones.
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