YOUARENOWHERE is a performance piece that combines high tech gadgetry, projections, and complex light and sound effects to explore the reality of time and space. It offers an elementary lesson in quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, and the difficulty of understanding perspectives beyond one’s own. The complication, of course, is one’s own time and place is ever-changing. What is currently the present, is instantly the past. Right now is no more and so on and so on and so on and so on. Defining one’s own perspective is itself a challenge.

 

Creator and performer, Andrew Schneider, first appears onstage in a flash of blue light, it’s quickly dark again. More light flashes and he is gone. Light flashes again and he returns. He speaks, the sound slurs. It clears up and jumps again. It’s disorienting, almost scary. He tells a sweet story, then a joke, he smiles, it’s relaxing.

 

Schneider’s performance is engaging. He’s not wearing a shirt. He is wearing what look like wireless microphone transmitters in bands around his biceps. His presence is comforting but the light and the sound glitches are unsettling. The audience is on edge and confused but enjoying themselves.

 

Then in an instant everything changes. The show’s completely different than it was. A recognizable pop song plays and there’s dancing. It’s light-hearted yet menacing. What is going on? My mind is racing, a mystery slowly unfolds but the more I understand the more I am confused. Have I been abducted? Is this farce? An elaborate practical joke? No, I came here with a friend and she is still sitting next to me, impossible that she’s in on this. Are there mirrors involved? I can’t see my reflection. Have I died? Am I vampire? Before I can settle, I’m asked to switch seats. Everything is the same but totally different from this new seat.

 

YOUARENOWHERE is a performance I’ll be thinking about for a very long time. It broke every cynical bone in my body and replaced them with optimism, really more of a burning desire to hunt, for the next great performance that will expand my view of what is possible in the theater and in life. That burning desire, however, arrives with an ache and a sorrow. Live performance is a terrible lover. She thrills and excites and then vanishes, leaving no remnant but a cold, flaccid playbill offering only listings and billings of the past and no insight or hope for the future.

 

YOUARENOWHERE is one of the most amazing pieces of theater I’ve seen in a very long time. Words strain to capture my reaction to and emotional fallout from this piece, for a taste of the later witness this week’s Maxamoo Theater and Performing Arts Podcast. Please, Andrew Schneider, tell me there will be more.

 

YOUARENOWHERE was part of the COIL annual performance festival sponsored by Performance Space 122.