Do Your Happy Dance, Jericho!

Do Your Happy Dance, Jericho! is a new piece exploring the resilience of storytelling amidst difficult times. For his 22nd birthday, one guy trapped in a theater decides to share with his Zoom party guests how he passes time and escapes from reality: making up a story on the spot, and playing all the characters. He has happy-danced as “Jericho” and played around as many other characters, and now we get to see who he becomes next and what world will be built before our eyes, then left behind after the brief time that we’re together. 

Through experimental and devising methods, this piece has been created through months of collaboration and explorations of ‘improv in isolation.’ If life is just one long improvisation, we can only do our best to keep up and keep going. And like living through a pandemic, we’re just winging it and taking it each day, week, month at a time. 

For his Senior Project in Theater and Performance Studies, Marty Chandler will perform this piece live via Zoom from the Whitney Theater as an investigation of his research questions about how we can use spontaneity to portray human experience onstage—questions which come into contact with themes of ephemerality, the joy of creation, and our desire for connection in these unprecedented times.