Andrew Schneider: New Work-in-Progress Showings

Andrew Schneider joins two international dancers in the Cube to develop a new audio/dance work inspired by “the hyper-precise synchronicity” of movement, commissioned in part by the Moss Arts Center and the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT).

These work-in-progress showings and related workshop offer you the opportunity to take a view rarely seen: from behind the curtain as artists develop a new work.

An OBIE Award winner and Drama Desk nominee, Schneider is a performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist based in Brooklyn, New York, where he has created original works for theatre, dance, sound, video, and installation since 2003.

XXXXX

Performers enter and exit the performance space. Slowly, we begin to realize they might be present together in the same space, but perhaps not present together in the same time. They just miss each other. They barely avoid running into each other.

Using wireless in-ear monitors (to provide “hidden” instructions and impulses) and a deep commitment to precision of mundane movement, the artists investigate impossible overlapping realities accented by hyper-precise lip-synching and “inhabitation” of their own and each other’s voices, and the perfect synchronization not just of movement, but of impulse. The characters they inhabit are together in space, but are they together across time, or are they days, years, centuries apart?

After a month-long, sold-out, critically-acclaimed premiere of his latest installation/performance work, NOWISWHENEWARE (the stars), at BAM in New York City, Andrew Schneider returns to his roots as a performer and theatre maker with a new evening-length work for the stage. Currently titled XXXXX, the work takes major inspiration from Richard McGuire’s HERE (soon-to-be a major motion picture in 2024), and the scientific and philosophical concept of “Block Universe Theory” (Eternalism), to tell the story of the place you are in right now, and the innumerable lives, dreams, and travesties that have floated through our present over the eons of the earth's existence.

Schneider is joined in this process by collaborators Margaux Marielle-Tréhoüart and Joel Suarez Gomez, who have previously worked with him on his evening-length dance piece, REMAINS, commissioned by the Sasha Waltz & Guest dance company.

Using wireless in-ear monitors and a deep commitment to precision of mundane movement, the team began investigating impossible realities accented by hyper-precise lipsynching of their own and each other’s voices, and the perfect synchronization not just of movement, but of impulse.

To be in the same place at the same time describes a general sense of what present-ness might feel like. It also describes, partly, the scientific concept of simultaneity.

XXXXX has received support from the Akademie Der Künste in Berlin, Jacob’s Pillow, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Williams College, Loghaven, The Voxel (upcoming), and the Moss Arts Center and Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, Virginia Tech (upcoming).

This is Schneider's first performance at the Moss Arts Center.