“OK, here we go,” laughs Schneider, drawing a breath before describing the formation of YOUARENOWHERE. A piece that took the award-winning creator years to devise, its origins are as multilayered as the performance itself. “I enjoy moments, and looking at how we arrive at a particular moment,” he says. “I was really interested at the time in rapidly shifting architecture, like rapidly shifting between two places at the same time. I couldn’t really get that with traditional theatrical infrastructure. I had this lighting idea, and there was this frame: I could turn the lights on and off really quick, so there was a way for me to rapidly focus and defocus. It was something I’d never seen before. I’d seen it in my head, but I wanted to see it out loud.”
From then, it was long process of refinement as Schneider wrote and re-wrote the script to further crystallise his ideas. After hitting a wall and stopping development for a solid year, inspiration was found between the pages of complex quantum physics theses. It was these cosmic ideas that re-ignited the creative flame. “Little tendrils grew out of non-fiction I was reading,” recalls Schneider, who had found himself captivated by the prospects of parallel universes and time travel. “We took a lot of time to curate how they went together, and curating the world in which they live. It’s a weird world, in that things aren’t quite what they same. The whole parallel universe section came out of thinking about reality, love and physics, and how they’re kind of the same thing.”
With its newfound focus, the production began to fall into place. “Someone had put a book in my hand called Autoportrait by (French photographer) Edouard Leve,” he says. “It’s just two true statements about himself, and he doesn’t judge it. There’s no paragraphs; the book starts and the book ends. It’s just like, ‘I prefer this to this. When I was eleven, I bit into a baguette and it had a cigarette butt in it’. It’s very random, and they’re not curated in order. But the reason is, he is able to make a bigger thing out of that. You put two things together and you get the whole parataxis thing, and a third bigger thing comes out. I was reading that, and the book became about me. I thought that if there is a parallel universe that is going to happen, the same thing is going to happen at the same time.”
It’s fascinating to hear Schneider’s mind make rapid connections between literature and physics, the minutiae of life and the beauty hidden beneath it. You can hear the gears turn over in his mind, processing information at a dizzying speed. With YOUARENOWHERE, you get a sense that art imitates life. That same rapid-fire cognitive thinking is reflected in a narrative that jumps between quantum mechanics to missed connections and AA recovery steps. Although as Schneider states, the narrative arc of the production is far from conventional. In the same way that we can longer take in the barrage of information presented to us daily, Schneider wants his audience to feel overwhelmed at times, disorientated by the onslaught of ideas thrown at them.
“It’s constantly shifting perspectives,” he says. “It’s never in the present. It’s always just a little bit in the future, or a little bit in the past. It’s like a little sparkler that moves along in time that puts its little sparkler tendrils out in every which way. It’s kind of like existence for me, in the immediate realm. I wanted to bring the neural landscape into the real, and really shift things very quickly because I think it sustains and can be a curation of emotion without narrative. I think that’s why people like music. You know, I would go to rock concerts and just watch the lights and be moved. I don’t think that that’s trite, I think that that speaks to a bigger thing about what we can be interested in.”
Schneider has long been obsessed with pushing technology to new heights, albeit not in the way you might expect. For him, technology is loaded with emotion. He creates inventions that act as an extension of his body, inventions that become woven into the fabric of his theatrical skill-set just as much as traditional expressive skills. With YOUARENOWHERE, the aim is to create something immediately visceral.
“The show for me is about human connection,” he says. “You’re always existing in your own head, and very rarely do you get out it and share something with another human being. I think that’s what this show tries to do – to get at a notion of the self. It uses all these effects, and lots of things happen to keep you on edge, but for me, it’s curating your experience to where you’re vulnerable enough to accept me talking to you as a human being.”
BY JAMES DI FABRIZIO
