CAFÉ BON BON uses lessons learned in our last piece, TRACE, as a launching pad to further investigate the power of aurally based urban explorations. The piece plays with notions of personal intimacy and identity as they blend with and confront the structures of public space.

Using the insulating capacity of headphones to bring awareness to their own bodies, participants will embody one of four characters of differing ages, genders, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Their own perceptions and those of the character overlap like transparencies. A negotiation of identity ensues. Beginning in their own home, their private possessions suddenly belong to this other “person” - their other self. They then move into an uncontrolled space - the street - where one identity might have permission to do something, the other does not. And finally they arrive at an actual nightclub and have to determine who else belongs to this secret world and how they need to interact with the people around them.

Attempting to ferret out and feel subterranean imaginative links that connect apparently disparate individuals, CAFÉ BON BON turns audience members into the protagonists of their own “movies” who wander into a partially controlled environment – a real nightclub where a variety show is underway.

Embedded in this real place with real patrons, they order drinks, sit back and watch the acts. After singing, a club performer might come up and begin a conversation calling them by their character’s name. Over the next hour of performances it slowly becomes clear that each character has a very specific connection to this bar - everyone belongs to a web of relationships of alternate personalities swimming beneath the “surface” of the evening. The four narratives that began earlier this night in front of the refrigerator become tied together with the showing of a film. This actual movie, set in the nightclub, tells the story of how the quartet of characters play out the expressions of need and longing that led them to the club in the first place.

With CAFÉ BON BON we open up the possibility for participants to confront the questions: What is the space between our culturally determined identity and how we feel? Can we really put ourselves into someone else’s life? Are we really in our own lives? Who are we and what do we have to do with one another? By partaking in CAFÉ BON BON, audience members playfully negotiate their own assumptions, prejudices, fears, joys and understanding of the communities to which they belong or don’t belong.

Investigating personal identity, cultural identity, community, and our own bodies, BON BON is a reflective theater of sensation, imagination and game play.