The Bard
The Bard began with an idea for a temporary installation that served to create a public space that democratized Shakespearean performance for all members of the community.
The temporary installation challenged what accessible performance means for every member in the community. Exploring audience and viewer relationships, these types of performance transcend the stage and enter into an architecturally-mediated totality.
The immersive theatre brings the audience into the spaces of each scene, permitting intimate experiences with the actors. The spaces do not rely on stage production, but turn to architecture that exemplifies the spaces through form and scale.
Drawing upon a study of architectural precedents and set design of past productions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, The Bard presents a collection of spaces that inform audience members of which play or scene they are viewing based on architectural elements of individual settings and time periods.
The Bard sits on a city corner and extends to the street with a ramp that invites passersby to the courtyard. Here, the mass of the theatre is broken by a slippage into the facade. Blending the Shakespeare plays Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, The Bard allows audiences to draw from scenes in each of these plays, granting each audience member a unique experience.
Walking through the spaces, audience members are drawn to the scenes that interest them through the exploration facilitated by architectural space; sight lines, expanding and contracting spaces, and stacked, interlocking volumes. By avoiding a traditional scene-by-scene walk-through of each play, the theatre suggests that the canonical works of Shakespeare are in service to the actors’ abilities, rather than the plot. As such, the immersive theatre is suggesting Post-Shakespearean performance. No longer does the proscenium bound audiences and performers to spaces all their own; now, it disappears and liberates the two.
