Picture this . . . two people, a fish, a New York City apartment on top of a trailer bed, and you. Exquisite Corpse Company returns to Guild Hall with a portable living diorama of 2020 — creating a live interactive, immersive experience meant to keep audience members and artists safe.
Written by ECC writers-in-residence Leah Barker, Emily Krause, and Elinor T Vanderburg, produced by Liz Frost, and co-directed by Porcia Lewis and Guild Hall Artist in Residence alumni and ECC’s Artistic Director Tess Howsam, Zoetrope will be taking to the streets of Brooklyn and beyond in the summer of 2021, but first ECC will build, rehearse, and perform the new production at Guild Hall’s John Drew Backyard Theater with socially distanced seating for a limited audience on Friday, April 23 and Saturday, April 24.
ECC’s mission for 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 — and Covid-19 conscious — platform.
Over the course of 35 minutes, the audience experiences an intimate, interactive live performance, and will play a significant 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.
In talking about the creative process of the writing of the script, Frost shared, “As a byproduct of trying to figure a way to produce safe live theater that is also interactive for the audience, Tess designed an outline for the way that the scripts could be built with the audience choosing which scenes are played out. This is important both to the audience interaction of the show.”
“In the spring of 2020, we produced two online festivals, Site-Specific 2020 and Site-Specific Rebirth,” said Howsam. “These events were interactive, with a drinking game attached to the show themes, but we also relied on technology to connect with our community. ‘Zoetrope’ is the solution to putting our audience and actors back in the same space while keeping both safe.”
Fourteen viewings of “Zoetrope” will take place between the afternoons and evenings of Friday, April 23, and Saturday, April 24.
Tickets are $50 per two-person box and $30 per one-person box and space is limited to no more than five audience members per performance. Visit www.guildhall.org.