This season, Boulder, CO based theatre company The Catamounts — no stranger to immersive or the pages of NoPro — have teamed up with 3rd Law Dance/Theater for UNCONTAINABLE, which takes place inside a most unusual venue “a series of shipping containers installed within [an] old Macy’s parking garage.”
Exploring themes of real human connection in our increasingly mediated world, UNCONTAINABLE is, in part, about what happens when you give yourself permission to disconnect from the distraction industrial complex and be very much present where you are. Right at that moment.
We checked in with co-director Amanda Berg Wilson about the new show which is playing now through June 14th.
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No Proscenium: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Amanda Berg Wilson: UNCONTAINABLE is an immersive dance/theater event unfolding inside a series of shipping containers installed within the old Macy’s parking garage in Boulder, CO.
Set in a near future where human interaction has largely retreated into digital space, UNCONTAINABLE imagines a renegade group of artists who gather at sundown to reclaim what has been lost: the intimacy and electricity of being together in real time and space.
It draws from memories of a not-so-distant past when devices were turned off, conversations unfolded face-to-face, and communal experience was a daily practice.
It is immersive because central to the purpose of the renegade group's gathering is that spectators become participants the moment they arrive in the parking garage. These renegades are proselytizers of presence, and their experiment in reconnection must be conducted on a newly initiated group willing to surrender their phones for just an hour. What unfolds requires your willingness to remember what it means to be undistracted from the folks around you.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
ABW: UNCONTAINABLE was born out of a discussion between my co-director Katie Elliott and me around the time that the Trump administration began cutting and restricting funding for the arts. It coincided with feeling squeezed by the ever-increasing cost of producing performance. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we'd make work in spite of it, wherever we could, with whatever resources we could garner. The notion of producing a show in a box was tossed around, and that became a more serious conversation about creating a show in shipping containers.
We're interested in the way performance can enliven pedestrian spaces. Among both companies, we've produced on golf courses, in swimming pools, on a farm, at trailheads, on buses, and more. Performance in those spaces can feel like a secret gathering. That feeling led our playwright Jeffrey Neuman to imagine this renegade band, and the characters began to take shape.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
ABW: Shipping containers can feel like dioramas, or as Katie often references, like the iconic handheld view masters from the 50s that offer a three dimensionality of huge worlds inside tiny spaces. We’ve leaned into that.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
ABW: I was worried people would be resistant to the idea of parting with their phones, which the piece asks them to do in a key narrative moment. But there has been a kind of wild communal joy from the audience when they do. (And, folks who don’t want to give them up don’t have to!) We were also surprised by how much the conflict needed to be deepened within the existing material–we needed to show more rather than tell. That is the advantage of dance as one of the storytelling vocabularies– it deepens how things are felt rather than their intellectual meaning.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
ABW: Read the seminal article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Look at photos–prints–of a pre-digital moment, if you have one. Listen to a song you can remember singing with your friends around a campfire or hanging out in your basement. Then make sure to check the weather, and dress for it!
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