On The Boards presents
ACTING STRANGER
With Minna Lee, Andrew Schneider, Fox Whitney, and you
Created by Andrew Schneider, Produced in partnership with Los Angeles Performance Practice
On the Boards, Seattle’s home for contemporary performance art, continues to fearlessly navigate current and future circumstance and explore possibilities for creating and presenting new work in a socially distant world. This fall On the Boards will present the newest iteration of Andrew Schneider’s ACTING STRANGER, re-developed in partnership with Seattle-based artists Minna Lee and Fox Whitney, director and curator Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and produced in partnership with Los Angeles Performance Practice. The project will then embark on a national tour over the next two years, generating a living archive of our post-pandemic world.
OtB Artistic Director Rachel Cook had this to say regarding Schneider’s work which was first presented at On the Boards in 2018, “Upon first experience, Schneider’s work might be described as tech-hallucinatory theater, but in reality, I believe Schneider and his collaborators push the artistic discipline of theater into unknown places in order to craft a set of visually poetic ideas about our existence in the world and how we experience it as emotional humans.”
ACTING STRANGER is an experiential participatory project designed to help us collectively navigate reconnection in both fleeting and profound ways – from the drudgery of another video-conference call to a future full embrace with a complete stranger. Each iteration of the project will be co-authored with local artists in each city, and will be fully responsive to the current moment, including its freedoms, restrictions, debates, hardships, resilience and humanity.
“Perhaps one of our most important jobs in this moment is to simply pay very close attention. Our hope is that Acting Stranger will help us track and understand how we collectively meet each other across time and space, over the next two years and in multiple cities, as we re-connect, grieve our losses, and re-imagine community.”
Andrew Schneider
Seattleites can sign up (actingstranger.com) to participate by performing short scenes with Minna Lee, Andrew Schneider, or Fox Whitney, playing the role of “A Stranger.” Scenes will be discretely recorded in public spaces, at a safe distance, to be later screened as part of a drive-in video series hosted by On the Boards in Lower Queen Anne. Scenes are brief (1-5 minutes) and explore how intimacy and relationships develop and evolve, even at a distance. Participants are integral to the work and the experience in this unique piece of performance.
ACTING STRANGER was developed by Andrew Schneider. Writing and performance by Minna Lee, Andrew Schneider, and Fox Whitney. Dramaturgy by Raelle Myrick-Hodges. Sound by Bobby McElver.
Andrew Schneider was last in Seattle in October 2018 with two of his recent works, YOUARENOWHERE and AFTER. Previous iterations of ACTING STRANGER have been presented by Melbourne Festival and Mass Live Arts.
To learn more, or become A Stranger, visit ontheboards.org or actingstranger.com
