I made a thing. :)
https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/the-liminal-space/
The genesis for the project came from a visit I made to the theatre about two months after we closed everything down. Everything happened so suddenly; we closed THE LADY FROM THE SEA a few hours before the first preview and there was no chance to clean up or strike anything.Â
When I did return to check on the building and pick up a few items we needed for working remotely, walking back into the theatre was a sort of punch in the gut. Everything was right where we’d left it. The stage manager’s prompt book lay open on her table. The director’s music stand. My special tech coffee mug. Props on shelves backstage and costumes hung up haphazardly in the dressing rooms. The circle of chairs on stage where the acting company gathered as we wrestled with whether or not to close the show. It reminded me of my first visit to Pompeii, the way everything was just frozen in time.Â
It’s a ritual of mine to sit alone in a darkened theatre, usually after everyone else has gone home at the end of a long tech day. I tell myself that it’s inertia keeping me in my seat, that I’m too tired to face the commute home just yet. But really, those moments of stillness are like church for me. It’s when I reconcile with my love for the theatre despite all of the difficulties. It erases the doubts. And I tap into the energy of all the actors and audience and emotions that have inhabited the space in the past. I first discovered this ritual while working in my spooky old college auditorium and have been doing it ever since.Â
So, returning to the theatre after our hasty departure gave me a chance to sit in a seat and absorb all those feelings the way I used to do at the end of a long tech day. It felt raw and beautiful and tragic – exactly the way live theatre should be. And I wondered if there was a way to capture and share that experience. Coincidentally, that same day, our Director of Marketing emailed me to say that she’d heard of a theatre in the UK that had set up a webcam on stage, and could we do something like that? Boom. The project was born.Â
 I tasked our Sound and Video Supervisor with figuring out how we might set up a live stream of the theatre and operate the video projectors and audio remotely and our Master Electrician with getting a set of programmable LED light bulbs.  I borrowed a set of 4 ghost lights from Manual Cinema (because weirdly, we’ve never owned one). We reached out to the artistic team to see if they were comfortable with my repurposing their work for this new thing we had in mind. I asked the marketing team if “The Liminal Space” was too nerdy a title (they reassured me that nothing is too nerdy for UChicago).Â
And so we launched it at the end of June. Some days I visit (virtually) and monkey with the lighting multiple times a day, other days it feels too raw for me to open the link at all. In my work as a Production Manager, I support/shepherd/facilitate the artistic process, but I rarely get to curate any work of my own. I was touched by the response from many of my fellow theatre artists. (It turns out I’m not the only one who likes to sit in an empty dark theatre. :)Â
As I write this, the piece is nearing the end of it’s first phase: a sort of meditation on what we created, and lost, with THE LADY FROM THE SEA. The sound effects, music, video and visual elements are all from work that was created for that show. Next I hope to expand out to video and audio from other Court productions as we celebrate all the spectacle, large and small, that has taken place over the past 40 years. After that I’d like to invite other artists into the space to use the set as a sort of canvas for their own work: a multimedia artist might use the video projectors to share something, or a musician might use the stage for a live solo concert. In its final stage, I hope to leave the camera on as we dismantle the set and return the stage to empty in preparation for moving forward into the next phase. Only then will we turn the camera off and “go dark.”
Press:
https://www.americantheatre.org/2020/07/07/onscreen-this-week-and-beyond-midsummer-nights-streams/
