Monday, December 06, 2021
Outside Theatre: Why It Mustn’t Stop After the Pandemic
The Theatre Times: Indoor theatre is back. Despite audiences being inscrutable in masks, I’ve seen two packed shows and begun to believe that theatres are finally recovering after a dreadful year. But the outdoor experiments that have kept theatre’s flame alight during the pandemic shouldn’t be cast aside in the process.
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3 comments:
I know this is so intensely nitpicky but I hate their font. It was bizarrely skinny and hard to read. That being said, I have never seen an outdoor show and I would really love to. Especially their mentioning of a performance in a nature preserve. Despite my anxiety over the bugs and the possibility of getting lost in the woods post-show in the dark I would 100% like to do this at least once in my life. While I do agree with them that zoom theatre became big and in many ways succeeded in creating new, interesting, and imaginative solutions to the challenges of the platform, outdoor events were an established and modifiable way of getting people back in person safely. I hadn't thought about how outdoor performance struggles with subtlety and subtext specifically because of the lack of ability to convey emotion and mood through lighting. Very interesting points and examples brought up on the complexities and advantages of outdoor performance.
This past summer I worked at the Bard College in Upstate New York as a general management intern where me team and I were responsible that all the outdoor shows in the festival, which were five out of the seven in the whole festival, would take place. That meant that we needed to make sure that all thos outdoor performances had to open on the day that they were supposed to and in the event that weather was to affect that or make the show near impossible to put up, to find another day and reschedule the whole event. As someone who did not know the fickle nature of weather in Upstate New York, I truly did not anticipate how many times in a week these outdoor events would be rescheduled. It was definitely a task to move those around but we also were on the verge of losing certain audience members who could potentially not attend the shows on the new dates. So I think maybe I am biased against outdoor events because of how inconvenient they can be for the audiences. That being said, I do understand the place the author of the article is coming from.
I’m not exactly sure why this article was written because it starts off by saying theater should continue outside but then it goes into a passage about how theater has been going on outside forever. I’m just surprised that this needs to be said because I don’t think outdoor theater is in any real danger because I’ve seen numerous outdoor performances before the pandemic. Ren fairs, Shakespeare in the park, and street performances just to name a few. The specific notes about the differences between indoor and outdoor theater were interesting, noting that we try to obtain full control of all the senses inside whereas outside you can’t control weather, birds, or nearby loud pickup trucks. I’m really not too concerned that outdoor theater, which is the original type of theater, is going to be forgotten about post-pandemic. I’m really not too concerned. People have certainly spent more time recently trying to figure out how to utilize the outdoors so maybe there will be more performances like tangled feet.
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