A Show With No Script

Recently coming to an end on November 13th, a show called This Time Tomorrow was being performed in the basement of Duryea Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn.  Audience members had to sign up online to see this show, and were directed through email to meet up at the Blue Marble, which is around the corner from the church.  Here, each member of the unsuspecting audience was given a free hot chocolate before being sent to the basement of the church.  Once there, the people were led to a small area of seats, with the front row of seats nearly touching the curtain.  The curtain opened upon a seemingly plain basement, complete with just a few tables, chairs, balloons, and streamers.  Also on “stage” was performer Paola Di Tolla, who stared at the audience before frantically contorting her body and face into strange positions.  She seemed to be trying to “desperately…entertain important, easily dissatisfied guests, whose mood she couldn’t quite gauge.”  After a little while of this, Di Tolla was joined by two other performers (Ben Beckley and Dan Cozzens), who immediately joined in with Di Tolla’s crazy gestures.  The three tried a number of different things to try and gain the approval of their audience.  They danced and ran around, moved furniture, acted out a number of different scenarios, dragged themselves along the floor.  The audience was no doubt confused, to say the least, by the strange happenings on the stage.  However, this was the goal Di Tolla, Beckley, and Cozzens wished to achieve when writing this show.  They thought of their performance in This Time Tomorrow as “practicing a performance that we couldn’t predict.”

This Time Tomorrow was different each time it was performed, depending on how the audience reacted to what was going on before them.  Even though this show was planned to be this way, every performance, whether it be dance, music, or theatre, is different upon each performance.  No matter how a performer may try to make the show exactly the same each time, they cannot help but be affected even a little by the environment created by a particular audience.  If an audience reacts positively to what is being performed, the performer is likely to get more pumped and excited, possibly generating a better and more interesting show.  On the other hand, if an audience clearly looks bored during the performance, the performer may very easily get discouraged, resulting in a sort of tired, less energetic show.  An audience contributes to a show just as much as the performers themselves do.

You can take a look at the article here.