The Exploration Of The Everchanging ITERATION 6 Opens Next Week

The Exploration Of The Everchanging (EOTE) Team is back in the rehearsal room with new changes in mind: this iteration examines the audience's experience in live performance through the lens of structure and form.

EOTE is an interactive, experimental theater piece dissecting the relationship between audience and performer. Director Clara Wiest was interested in creating a body of work that can reflect the everchanging process of being alive and how this ntersects with the development of the work.

I like to refer to EOTE as a body of work or a laboratory, where the contents can develop and grow with our everchanging curiosities about performance and connection with the audience, as time moves on. We are conceptualizing the invisible dynamics that happen when humans (audience-performer specifically) interact, how these dynamics can be influenced and intentionally shifted.

At Exploration Of The Everchanging, we are exploring what it feels like to move away from trying to understand everything, to simply be present and open with ourselves and what's in front of us. And that takes an open, curious, and patient audience.

We challenge the audience and the performer to embody a state of open presence. In our work, we talk a lot about the communal experience. We are exploring the minuscule interpersonal moments that happen between performer, content and audience in a live performance setting; a creative exchange between rigorous structure and deep listening in the moment.

EOTE is a playground for us to analyze parts of performance, aside from content. In the past we have explored audience interaction by exchanging power of choice, sharing responsibility of time keeping during a show, integrating the audience as the core part of a show, and exploring structure and form of performance.

In order for us to dissect and take apart structures of theater, we need to become aware of structures, rules, habits that are part of the live performance experience as we know it today. We are always in search of finding new ways to construct a show - to curate an experience. We refer to the show as an experience.

This time around we are exploring structure and form of performance. We are thinking of the structures within which the audience's experience of live performance. In Iteration 6, the role of anticipation in live performance has become a focal point. We have expectations about linear storylines, beginnings-middle-ends, around climax in order for a story to be told.

Previously, we started with the content search, and then later in the process figuring out to arrange this for a performance setting. Content search is where we explore ideas and concepts in order to get to the core of what our intention is. In our current process, we explored theatrical performance structure first and then filled this structural idea in with content creation. So we are shifting from internal to external, to external leads to internal, which offers us a new approach to realize our work.

The show is happening June 6-8 at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.