All Atwitter

Artists set their sites on a virtual audience.


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Published: Sep 1, 2009

Matt Saunders

Emily Letts as Anita Prowler in FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time

In a Northern Liberties warehouse space, actor Alex Bechtel stands in front of a large screen, on which his video image sits in a living room strumming an acoustic guitar.

Across the room, standing in front of another screen (this one, for the time being, blank), Delanté Keys glances over and laughs. "It's strange watching you watch yourself."

Strange, perhaps, but something we're increasingly getting used to. What are social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, after all, but a way to watch people watch themselves watching us watch them watch everybody else?

That unprecedented balance of intimacy and anonymity has captivated local artists to such an extent that no fewer than four of the shows in this year's Live Arts/Fringe are wrestling with it in some way.

New Paradise Laboratories' FATEBOOK takes Facebook as its inspiration — but also as its venue. In their NoLibs space, the company has been constructing a hall of Web 2.0 mirrors, a series of screens which will reflect back not only the images of the show's characters, but their feelings, thoughts, status updates. But by the time Fest audiences step inside, the show will already have been going on for months.

"It's been a very unusual creative process," says director Whit MacLaughlin. "How do you write a two-month-long play that people can come into anytime during the process, and they might stay three minutes, or they might stay three weeks?"

FATEBOOK has been a collaborative process, bouncing back and forth between real space and cyberspace, since its conception. The actors worked with MacLaughlin to conceive their characters and their relations to one another, which have continued to develop through Facebook updates, YouTube clips and Twitter feeds. These virtual performances have been viewed by almost 5,000 people so far — while the physical show will be experienced by only about 1,500, who will choose which character to follow through the space.

"The experience is curated by a combination of chance and self-will," MacLaughlin says. "Just like a lot of things. The audience is being invited to see in real space and in cyberspace, and to see what the difference is in how they perceive people in these two realms."

In having to constantly exist as their characters online, says Keys, "You answer questions that you don't always necessarily have to answer. What are my favorite books? Why do I like this music, and what kind of shows and movies do I watch? And because of that, I feel like the characters are really in-depth and fleshed out. They have a lot of ourselves in them, which makes them really tangible."

The characters in Melanie Stewart Dance Theatre's Kill Me Now have also maintained a Web presence. The show's Facebook page began as a marketing campaign, but over time Stewart realized that the season-long runs of the dance competition reality shows that she's parodying offered time for viewers to get to know the characters whose fate they would decide. Letting the fictional characters in her piece exist on Facebook offers a similar benefit to her potential audience.

Each of the show's six performers portrays both a judge and a contestant, each of whom have Facebook pages. The dancers participate in varying degrees, but Karl Schappell has been particularly active, especially in the guise of sex-addicted judge Nigel Bruce Hancock.

"I really like pushing buttons with Nigel," Schappell says. "I'm constantly coming on to the people who sign on to be his friend. Male, female, it doesn't matter. My 20-year-old niece befriended Nigel and I came on to her. It was completely inappropriate, and she was really freaked out at first. Then she came to see the preview, and now she has a great time with it."

For many of these performers, creating a separate persona on Facebook serves the same function as acting — allowing them to experience life as another person, however briefly. "They're fantasy characters, and I can live out all the fantasies that I would never do on my personal Facebook page," says Bethany Formica of Stewart Dance Theatre. "My Facebook page is on lockdown. You can't write on the wall, you can't post pictures, I don't do polls. But all the things that I detest on Facebook, I try out with these characters because I don't have to attach them to myself."

The virtual world as fantasyland also fascinated director Liz Carlson of Curio Theatre Co. and performer Katie Gould, both of whom created multimedia shows inspired by the Missed Connections section on Craigslist, where messages can be left for strangers who've crossed our paths.

"My feeling is that people actually don't want these people to respond," says Gould, whose To the Girl in the Yellow Dress... is a solo performance with text, song and movement. "What they really want to do is come up with these fantasies and wallow in their own angst and loneliness."

"We boiled the idea down to the innate human desire to stalk and to be stalked," says Carlson of Missed Connections: A Craigslist Fantasia.

"I'm saying, 'I'm sitting right here right now,' not because I want people to know, but I want them to come and find me here. I want somebody to be following me, I want somebody to be interested in my day-to-day movements. And I want to be interested in other people's. I want to know where my best friend from second grade is going to lunch."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

FATEBOOK, Sept. 4-18, $25-$30, 919 N. Fifth St.; Kill Me Now, Sept. 4-7, $25-$30, Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St.; To the Girl in the Yellow Dress ... , Sept. 13-17, $10, L'Etage, 624 Bainbridge St.; Missed Connections: A Craigslist Fantasia, Sept. 3-19, $15, Calvary Center Sanctuary, 4740 Baltimore Ave.