OK, that’s not as deft as the “Star Wars” crawl, but in these theater-depleted times, the Catamounts’ “The Rough” is a welcome adventure — and then some. The Boulder-based company has added a fresh set of dates for the sold-out outdoor, socially distanced romp at Westminster’s Legacy Ridge Golf Course, through Sept. 6.
4 comments:
I am so glad that people are finding ways to produce live theatre through this pandemic. Obviously, I wish we could be producing shows in a theatre again, but for now, doing shows on a golf course seems like a fun alternative. This article really did get me thinking about, though, how with the rise of outdoor theatre also seems to come the fall of a lot of technical positions. Actors will still be needed, but often it seems with outdoor theatre there are jobs in lighting, in run crew, in wardrobe crew, in technical direction, in carpentry, and many other areas that just aren’t needed in the same way they were before, if at all. So while I am glad that outdoor theater is becoming an option for people to experience live theatre again, it still is really hard and really sad to look at how many people in our industry are still without a job. Also, this article got me thinking about what theatres that are producing these immersive onsite outdoor shows are going to do once the weather wherever they are starts getting bad and people don’t want to spend their time outside sitting and watching (or performing) in a show.
I kind of love the concept of an outdoor performance you have to follow to watch. The golf carts for audience members makes that format more accessible. I think it also makes the audience more aware of the setting that the story takes place in because they also have to feel and experience that setting – I like that because it brings me even further into the world of the story. I also just love the outdoors and this brings people into the outdoors and to embrace its beauty. This outdoor production also embraces the technology of bone conduction headphones, which caught my attention, and is a brilliant way to incorporate sound design into a moving production. I also want to echo what Annika mentioned about how this format reincorporates many aspects of theatre that are eliminated in the digital format, which is also pretty great. Also, to her point about accounting for weather, I think that it adds both a conquerable challenge, and a magical element to the already unique environment, plus there are plenty of people that stick around for it. While I was interning at The Public Theatre, I was shadowing a crew member on an outdoor show in Central on a night with a thunderstorm. Their policy is to hold the show and all work for 20 minutes after there’s a lightning strike within 5miles, and that timer resorts with every strike. The show only gets cancelled if that goes on for too long. We waited out the storm for about an hour, and while doing so a lady came up to us and said that she’d been coming to shows in the park for decades, and that the nights it happens in the rain are truly magical. It really changed the experience.
I love this idea of following the “course” of a story on a golf course, adding an interactive and immersive element to a socially distant experience I think is really interesting. I love outdoor theatre personally I feel as though it always brings in unique elements that we as theatre makers can never truly recreate in an indoor venue and brings the world of the play to use better. That being said as someone who works on scenery and other technical elements I do have to think about what both Annika and Katie said above with the lack of technical elements presented in outdoor performance. I really love how theatres are exploring this traditional form of theatre in new ways however and examples like this show me how different experiences can be. I mean last summer I saw there in Boulder, Colorado doing outdoor theater in a more “traditional” sense with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and to see how other artists from that community have transformed their perspective of outdoor theatre due to the Covid-19 situation is really amazing to see.
I completely agree with everyone and share the excitement to see something like this happening! One thing everyone talks about with the pandemic is the chance for something new to be reborn from the ashes, and this form of performance could be one of those things. Outdoor theatre has been around for centuries, but its charm hasn't gone away. I worked at the Delaware Shakespeare Festival a few summers, and found that the experiencing theatre outdoors is something that really cannot be recreated in the traditional proscenium sense. This production takes that even further, allowing the audience to experience the world of the piece. It is really a combination of immersive theatre such as 'Sleep No More' and outdoor performance. One of the most fascinating things, in my opinion, is the use of bone-conducting 'headphones' for underscoring. This is just genius! Sean showed off is pair last year in PTM (which feels like decades ago now), and I was blown away with them. It felt like the world now had musical underscoring! I'm happy to read about something like this with all the other depressing articles that we see on a daily basis now, gives me a lot of hope for an exciting new theatrical world.
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