What a trip.

Not that the “passengers” aboard the Kaleidoscope were exactly rocketing into space. But as theatrical experiences go, “Flight 18” was otherworldly indeed.

The show, launched last month and ending April 4, takes place in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “Swing Space,” a sprawling two floors at 210 Front Street.  It was imagined by director/writer/producer Eric Wallach as a space flight filled with free flowing, mostly unscripted happenings—poetry, dance, song, video, existential meanderings, occasional mayhem, etc.

The audience is not just along for the ride, they are told. They are part of it.

“What performance lacks in New York is an acknowledgement of the audience and that’s what this is,” says Wallach.

“Please keep eyes, ears, body, heart and mind open at all times,” the crew tells passengers in a chorus of pre-takeoff safety instructions.
In un-NASA-like fashion, disco dancing precedes countdown and the room-rattling, engine-roaring “takeoff” that follows. Passengers watch the liftoff on a giant video projection overhead as the seaport recedes and the earth grows smaller.

After that, most anything can happen.

“To kick this off,” says crew member Josh Diamond at the start of one ride, “how many vegetarians do we have on board?” “How many neurotics?” “Passive-aggressives?”

Contortionist Amy Harlib takes the floor and ties herself into impossible knots. Then breaks into the song “Dona Dona,” backed up by the crew now-chorus.

Images from space, projected on the screen, fade into a video about birds, or into a plethora of flashing images that include mushroom clouds, starving children and Colin Powell. A moment of quiet contemplation, as the earth is seen rotating in video, explodes into a frenzy of mock panic and a loud, ominous beat. “Heads down! Heads down!” the crew shouts, and the passengers/audience comply.

Each bit begets another, so dizzying and unexpected that by the time a crew member takes off all her clothes and gives shoulder massages to the audience, it registers as a tame sideshow in a panoply of distractions.

“This is about giving people an environment where they can feel free,” says Wallach, the Kaleidoscope “Captain” who acknowledges a debt to performance artists and happenings of decades past.

Wallach said that he had been contemplating “Flight 18” for eight years, but until he saw 210 Front Street he imagined the setting to be an airplane. He threw out that idea and the 100-page script that went with it.

“I allowed the space to tell me what it wanted to be and it wanted to be a space ship,” says Wallach, “and it wanted to get off the planet.”
For some 90 minutes, you could say that it did.