In fact, 12 Hour Play is nothing like a play. It is a 12-hour dance-and-music improvisation produced by dancer Beth Graczyk and musician Jason E. Anderson. Last weekend's performance, the third incarnation, happened from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. in the warehouse-like space—high ceilings, concrete floors—at CoCA. The room was dark, with lit candles along a back wall and a pile of noisemakers in a corner—guitars, amps, a trumpet, a bass, and a laptop. The musicians (Angelina Baldoz, Jeff Huston, and Cristin Miller) only sometimes played their instruments, but the dancers (Sean Ryan, Beth Graczyk, Mark Haim, Amelia Reeber, and John Dixon) kept moving.
The dancers said performing 12 Hour Play was like hiking: pursuing physical and mental exhaustion as a form of recreation. Haim described it as "an attractive ordeal." Reeber said it was "choosing not to have choices—the audience is there the whole time and you're being seen, whether you like it or not." She also described the experience as "a mindfuck of time."
Watching 12 Hour Play was like visiting a zoo: You came and went, chatted or were silent, and felt incidental to the performance. The dancers—who were energetic, then fell into lulls, then found new energy, then became eccentric and goofy—just kept going, regardless. Within the first five minutes, Reeber said, two of the dancers were naked in a preemptive well, let's just get this bit out of the way right now strike. Shortly after I arrived, around midnight, there was a Beatles medley, sung to the candles at the far end of the room. When 12 Hour Play ended at 6:00 a.m., the dancers sat in a quiet circle while a few dedicated audience members, some of whom had been sleeping on the floor, cheered.
