One begins on the waterfront at the South Street Seaport winding its way under the Brooklyn Bridge into Chinatown.

The other path begins on the rooftop of a tenement building on the Lower East Side, and winds its way through Little Italy into Chinatown.

At the end of a week in which people can sign up for the audio tour, all of the listeners who walked in isolation will be gathered together to make up the audience for a performance.

It is night. Up in a small plush theater on 52nd Street and 5th avenue, everyone, comfortably in their seats, press play on their portable CD players. After a brief moment there is a familiar gentle voice. This time, instead of leading them on a tour through the city, it leads them through a series of relaxation exercises. The lights have been dimmed and suddenly there are flashes of images on the wall. An incident vaguely recollected by everyone sitting in the audience. A restaurant. A familiar scene. A lampshade, a photo on the wall, the door to the kitchen swinging open. Everyone in the audience has experienced these very things from this very angle. It is from the tour. The performance picks up where the audio tour left off.

The year is 2008. The setting is a special experimental chamber in the University Neuro-Surgical Operating Theater that allows access into the brain of a patient who has undergone brain surgery. The audience is specially prepared to enter, washed and given a CD player. They take their seats and prepare themselves for the exploration of the mind of a New York City Bicycle Messenger who suffered severe memory loss after after an accident in Mulberry Park four years earlier – January 1st, 2004.

The audience follows two doctors as they descend into the bottomless black well of the Messenger’s memory – a place where nothing is as it seems, where the recent dead intermingle with past loves and where sea monsters roam the brittle ground.

THE AUDIENCE - Tour, performance, and memory

What connects the Bike messenger to the audience as well as each audience member to every other person sitting in the theater, are the paths of the audio-tour. Everyone, including the messenger, has navigated the same streets. Through this common set of experiences and the residue of actual recent memory, we begin to link everyone in the room by focusing on the neurological patterning that is replicated in each one of us. The tie between Mapping the City and Mapping the Brain is established.

The Performance is a playful meditation on the synaptic processes that actually took place in the Brains of each audience member who walked the paths several days earlier. We investigate and play with how memories and false memories are constructed and lost. We look at the neurological phenomenon that allows us to construct a “coherent” vision of the world out of the millions of bits of fragmented sensory and conceptual information we experience daily.

And ultimately, by mixing narrative, movement, video and audio, we ask the questions of just what connects us to one another or not, and what can allow us to bridge the conscious divide that seemingly separates us.