Inside the site-evocative storytelling experience set inside a garden shed

A garden shed has been erected inside an empty warehouse. Golden lights from within glow in the darkness; the structure is a warm wooden heart set in a cold, vast expanse of concrete. Having waited for the performance within the Waterloo Vaults’ windy entrance tunnel encrusted with January frost, our group of six is eager to get inside. We cozy up to one another on benches and mismatched chairs inside the shed, cuddling up to the small pillows and rubbing our extremities as we look around.

The Archive of Educated Hearts is set in an environment which is a far cry from the libraries or reference institutions insinuated in its name. The shack is festooned with the trappings of childhood and its subsequent arrested emotional development: along the walls handmade decorations of bunting and print clippings are interwoven with photographs hung on clothespins. They dangle over shelves of toys and letters and costume jewelry. The air is gently scented with a flowery sweetness. Bric-a-brac consisting of VHS tapes, biscuit tins, and lace cuttings fill the drawers and shelves of tatty furniture, as we huddle around a scrubbed wooden trunk in the center of the space as if it is our hearthfire. Our host (Casey Jay Andrews) welcomes us without a hint of artifice: she ensures we’re comfortable and briefs us on the technical expectations, and with very little ceremony the performance immediately begins.

What follows is a very heartfelt and poetic story of living through the Before and After of cancer, told through the lives of five people (our host and four women in her life). The atmosphere of our little shed is regularly altered with lighting changes and soundtrack manipulation, all run by our host during the course of her monologues. She lays down photograph after photograph, a mandala of faces and places evolving on the surface of the trunk as the music builds to its emotional crescendo. We lean forward, absorbed in the story for lack of anything else to distract, watching and listening until the performance comes to its completion at the end of a half-hour. Our host finishes, thanks us for coming, and sees us out.

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At the end of this theatre-in-the-round experience I’m left craving more — more time to rummage the detailed set, an explanation for the setting of a garden shed, the opportunity to engage with the performance and have my presence matter apart from just showing up to sit and watch and listen. For thirty minutes, we’re temptingly surrounded by props that aren’t touched or referenced, a roomful of Chekov’s guns dangling impotently around us. The host manages all technical transitions during the performance, and without any sort of theatrical acclimation to the realm of the narrative or debriefing thereafter, it takes precious valuable minutes (in the scope of a half-hour performance) for me to transition “in” and “out” of the atmosphere.

The Archive of Educated Hearts is a good choice for audiences who prefer more voyeuristic experiences and would rather have minimal engagement with their theatre. The daunting expectation of being forced to contribute is a great fear among some patrons; in this case the audience is spared from being asked to improvise or expose themselves in the midst of emotionally demanding subject matter.

The performance is at its core a compelling, poetic story, set in a non-traditional theatre space. It is self-marketed as a “unique storytelling installation” and serves as an excellent example of site-evocative performance art — moving, sweet, but not particularly “immersive” despite its labelling on the VAULT festival website. Without more for the audience to do in order to feel valued and engaged as part of the story world, it is difficult to categorize these environmental experiences as “immersive” when there should be a more appropriate term to draw the correct demographic. Unfortunately, until theatrical advertising phrases such as “site-specific” or “exo-proscenium” gain the same widespread understanding and buzzword traction, The Archive of Educated Hearts will continue to be labeled as “immersive” for lack of a better word.

The Archive of Educated Hearts ran January 23–27 as part of the VAULT Festival 2019. The experience will tour to Australia later this year.

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