By Johnnie Walker

Wave Two of Buddies‘ experimental 2006/2007 season is called Audience Relocation and starts this weekend. As the name suggests, this part of the season is dedicated to finding new ways of defining what an audience is – and where it is. Don’t expect to sit in a chair watching a Well-Made Play.
Kicking off Audience Relocation is a show called Connect the Dots by theatre company Small Wooden Shoe. Connect the Dots is the latest in a series of works conceived by Jacob Zimmer called Dedicated to the Revolutions that began with Do You Have Any Idea How Fast You Were Going? at last year’s Rhubarb! Festival. Each show deals with a different technological revolutions – this time, it’s the Internet.
True to the spirit of experimentation Buddies has adopted this season, Connect the Dots explores its themes in unorthodox ways. “We demonstrate different kinds of networks using tin can phones,” says Zimmer. “We sing a song about Clickstreams and one about the QWERTY keyboard. We try to show how information is broken up and passed through the internet with Tinker toys and pipe.
“It’s not a “play” in a standard sense, but a series of conected demonstrations, personal stories and songs – some of which are absurd, some touching, some profound, many all three at once, all of them about the Information Revolution.”
The show also boasts a promising company including Mammalian Diving Reflex‘s Trevor Schwellnus, who designed the show, and Bluemouth Inc. vet Chad Dembski and theatrical man-about-town Frank Cox O’Connell in the cast.