Information Overload

Perhaps it's the man screaming and wearing a harness, balanced atop a car seat nailed to a dolly and pulled by a rope along a metal track bolted to the floor. Or maybe it’s the videography: choppy close-ups of a woman’s lips, taking us through a maze of time with broken phrases that, in real time, boil down to just a few circuitous seconds. The gadgets could do it. Seemingly mythical creations, like gloves that control video-audio projections with just a whoosh of the hand, or a helmet that projects television.

Whatever the reason, an afternoon spent with choreographer and performer Andrew Schneider is like taking a field trip from reality. It is truly the 21st century, and a discombobulated one at that.

“There’s no exposition,” Schneider, 28, explains about his work. “It’s just kind of like, catastrophic climax. There’s no denouement. Just really short scenes—wham! wham!—and that’s it. Cut out. Cut lights.”

In Wow & Flutter, at The Chocolate Factory Feb. 25 through 27, Schneider explores alternative theories about the relative dimensions of space and time. In the piece, he incorporates the works of writer David Foster Wallace and physicist Richard Feynman into a multimedia theater performance. The performance includes spoken poetry, theater, dance, video and electronics, all woven into a time-warped narrative about relationships, death and the invasion of technology. The performance art divulges themes of identity, quantum mechanics and the motion of time in memory, all invariably interspersed with high-tech, showstopping gear.

Schneider’s videography not only communicates his mastery of modern technology, but is also a way for him to explore the identity of relationships in the 21st century. At one moment, he interacts with the video lips, speaking to the argumentative image in sputtering pleas and rebuttals. Only, it’s clear that the two cannot communicate—the fragmented phrases are spoken at one another, not to each other, and the dialogue becomes hopelessly lost as the conversation goes backwards and forwards in time. The audience, in turn, is forced to put together the puzzle of chronology in the story’s narrative.

“The work becomes about work itself, inevitability,” Schneider says, explaining the use of video editing in his newest piece. “Within that is the meat of it, which is the interference of technology, how it’s interfering with personal relationships, stuff like that. And then the presentation itself.”

And the presentation is pretty spectacular. Using gloves with an accelerator hooked to an XB transmitter, Schneider sends wireless data to various screens set up throughout the theater. As he gesticularly maps onstage movement, he controls YouTube videos and sound effects, making them stop and start on a whim.

To put it simply, his high-tech gloves “allow you to use gestures to make things happen onstage,” Schneider says.

During his performance controlling the YouTube videos with his gloves, Schneider dances out the pop culture videos that he has selected from millions of “filmmakers,” inviting the audience to reflect upon the mass infiltration of media and technology into society.

From the performer who didn’t even have an email account until he was a junior in college in 2001, this show is a far leap from his former musical theater days. It all started, he says, when he decided to get an MFA in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Masters of Professional Studies.

Formerly a student at the Illinois Wesleyan University, Schneider moved to New York six years ago to pursue a career as a performer. He stopped doing musical theater because he eventually got bored singing the same songs.

“When I played the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors for, like, the third time, I knew I wanted to stop,” Schneider says.

The MFA program, Schneider says, is the platform from which he was able to launch his new interest in combining performance with design, like creating motion-sensitive gloves, or a bikini in which solar power charges a built-in iPod. Courses in computer programming, design and technology application all helped form Schneider’s technological artistry.

“It’s the degree that you can’t explain to your parents,” Schneider says. “It’s like art school for engineers, and engineer school for artists, dancers, web people, electrical engineers.”

Ironically, his hatred of a high-tech world is what fed his desire to emulate it.

“This was at a time when I didn’t like technology at all. I, like, finally had a cell phone,” Schneider says. “I thought, ‘This is what’s going to ruin interpersonal conversation.’ I was looking at the quality of conversation going down. It’s changing human behavior, changing culture, getting people addicted to idiot entertainment. I thought, ‘I need to know more about it. I need to understand it from the inside. Let’s understand why I hate technology, from the inside.’” While Schneider may now embrace technology, even thrive on using it, he is far from accepting its role in popular culture. His use of YouTube reflects his feelings about information overload, and society’s collective memory of usergenerated content.

“I still feel the same way about entertainment culture and TV. People are still willing to eat shit all day. I’ve never seen Jersey Shore, but I don’t need to see it from the inside, I still judge it. I’m still out of the loop as far as pop culture goes.”

-- Wow & Flutter Feb. 25-27, The Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Ave. (betw. Vernon Blvd. & 5th St.), Queens, 718-482-7069; 8, $15.