“Fun Right Now” is a collaborative performance and video art piece designed for Zoom. Created to experiment with Zoom as a medium and tool for performance, the piece explores the absurdity of human relationships in an age of restricted interaction and the ways in which our digital media shape our understanding of ourselves and others. “Fun Right Now” plays between character comedy, zoom sculpture, and choral poetry, stuck between the poetic anonymity of the internet and the ironic isolation of living our lives online.

Tuning in via Zoom link, the audience encounters a live video collage, meticulously timed and choreographed, controlled by 10 performers and a stage manager who are all scattered throughout the United States. The screen fills with a chorus of faceless mouths. Three friends (The King, The Celebrant, and The Manager) argue aimlessly via video chat about what is better or worse than “before.” When The King jogs to the gas station to buy a Bud Light Lime, we’re surprised at the strange discomfort of following a performer into a public place. Occasionally, video boxes pop on and off of the screen so rapidly that the grid rearranges and we lose the plot. Over and over, the grid of faceless mouths appear, chanting and singing about anger, solace, pleasure, and fright—emotions that hang in the air as each character sits in the fraught stillness of their strange new world.

This piece was created to experiment with the performance possibilities inherent in the functionality and visual organization of Zoom, which has very recently and very quickly become something of a common place, language, and curse to us all. Inside Zoom as a performance space, entrances and exits are made at the click of a button and virtual backgrounds confuse the live and the prerecorded. We spent several months experimenting with settings and functions within the platform and mining them for storytelling devices, sculptural possibilities, choreographic design, strangeness and beauty. We took these discoveries and wove them together with material generated by a group tarot card reading and a random word generator, to craft a strange world full of characters yearning for physical connection again even as they realize that past cannot be the present, or even the future anymore. Each of them finds anger, solace, and loss of self throughout the piece, where Zoom is not Zoom and reality is not as real as it seems to be.