INTERVIEW: In Brooklyn, you can travel to the ‘Bottom of the Ocean’
Photo: Andrew Hoepfner stars in Bottom of the Ocean, an immersive show he also created. Photo courtesy of Chia Kwa / Provided by Matt Ross PR with permission.
Andrew Hoepfner, the theatrical artist behind Houseworld and Whisperlodge, is back with another immersive experience, this time on a church property in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His new piece is called Bottom of the Ocean, and it finds select audience members being led around an atmospheric, surprising, somewhat unsettling environment by a team of spirit guides. What transpires throughout the performance is meditative, ritualistic and mysterious.
Here’s how Hoepfner describes the experience: “Five guests arrive in this hidden underground location in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and they go inside. And a group of spirit guides guide them through a sequence of invented rituals. It’s meditative. There’s some reflection. There’s some catharsis, and the intention of the performance is to allow the visitors to escape into a dream world, to allow them to maybe consider some of the meaning and pleasure we get from ritual and ceremony, and to dive into the self.”
Hoepfner, who is credited as the creator and sometimes performer of Bottom of the Ocean, said that audience members should not expect a “scary” experience. Yes, those who are sensitive to creepy, dark environments and audience interaction may be unsettled, but for those audience members who, say, enjoyed Sleep No More in Chelsea, this theatrical work should be enjoyable and transportive.
“I think our audience finds that most of it isn’t scary at all,” he said. “I would compare it to the amount of spookiness that’s in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In that story, Jacob Marley with the chains is scary, and the Ghost of Christmas Future is scary and intended to be scary. But there’s also a lot of stuff like Christmas Present, Christmas Past, the stuff before the ghosts come where there’s storytelling about London and a greedy person and a poor person. With BOTO, I would say 85-90 percent is meditative. It’s meant to be soothing and dreamlike, and it’s not meant to be a horror movie.”
Although ritual is a word that Hoepfner often used to describe BOTO, the piece is not overtly religious. He was quick to point out that the immersive piece does not use the specifics from any faith tradition. Instead, his interest in ritual comes from his time working in a church setting as a piano player and organ player. He’s a self-described nonbeliever, but he is fascinated by spiritual ritual and has worked some of that movement and meditation into BOTO.
“Observing those services from the outside, I saw things that people like about it, whether it’s communion and the chalice, or baptism and the water, or a confession booth at a Catholic Church,” Hoepfner said. “And so because I don’t connect with those stories, I have to shut myself off from the ritual, even though there are symbols in there or actions in there that I would like. I think that BOTO is my attempt to create an alternate setting where people can play with those sorts of actions and symbols.”
Bottom of the Ocean began as an idea in Hoepfner’s apartment, and then it came to life with one performer: that is, Hoepfner himself as the spirit guide. Today, BOTO is performed nine times a week with multiple actors, and as of press time, all performances are sold out through April. For Hoepfner, the experience of seeing the germ of an idea grow into this theatrical phenomenon has likely been fascinating and humbling.
“So in the beginning it was one on one, and I was everybody,” he said. “Then for a long time it became three performers, so now there’s a cast of 12. And I am often one of the three performers performing, although there’s always several nights a week when I’m not in the cast. That was a necessary step to make it sustainable. Come January we’ll be performing it nine times a week, and for me to perform all nine of those shows would have been exhausting. We might even expand it to 10 or 11 shows per week, and so a big milestone was to create a show that is Andrew-independent, but I still perform it a lot, probably five or six times a week.”
He settled on this church property in Bushwick because of his time working as a church musician. For his 2015 show Houseworld, he needed to scope out properties around the city, and he would look for under-utilized spaces that still retained their historic beauty. This Bushwick property did not make the final cut for Houseworld, but its entrancing atmosphere stayed with him.
“This was one of the places that was scouted in 2015, and it was the second place candidate for Houseworld,” he said. “And so when I got an idea of what Bottom of the Ocean was after my demo, I came back here because I kept a list of all the places I liked. And I basically Google-mapped churches in a neighborhood that I thought would work, whether it be Asotira or Lefferts Gardens or Harlem. I would just spend two or three hours walking from church to church and looking at which ones seem to have an empty social hall or seem to have a school that didn’t have air conditioners in the window, so maybe it wasn’t being used.”
This Bushwick church complex fit the bill, and now he’s taking audience members from Brooklyn to the Bottom of the Ocean.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Bottom of the Ocean is currently playing at Gymnopedie in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Click here for more information and tickets.
