This past January, I was organizing a panel for Fort Collins Startup Week called “Arting Up
Theater: New Territories and Emerging Forms”. I was determined to include smart talk about
immersive theater, which has been thriving in the theater capitals of the world for years but has
only begun to start capturing imaginations here in Colorado.
I reached out to Charlie Miller, curator of Off-Center at the Denver Center for the Performing
Arts, whose immersive productions of “Sweet & Lucky” in an antiques store and “The Wild
Party” at the Hangar at Stanley Marketplace have changed the game. Charlie did his best to re-
arrange his schedule and hit the I-25, but the timing wasn’t right. He turned me on to Amanda
Berg Wilson, director of “The Wild Party”, performer in “Sweet & Lucky”, and Founding Artistic
Director of the Catamounts, where her new immersive theater work “Rausch” will start on a
party bus and journey to a forest where the audience will encounter the Catamount’s own 21st
century version of the Persephone myth. Charlie said Amanda would be a fantastic addition to
the panel – and he was right.
A few weeks after Amanda joined us on the panel, we sat down for a chat at the Boulder
Dushanbe Teahouse to talk about “Rausch” and her life in theater.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you find your way into theater?
I grew up in Houston in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when roller skating was a really big deal.
Our next door neighbors had one of those circular driveways, and when I was five I used to
stage roller skating shows there. I would go and knock on neighbors’ doors and say, “You know,
the show is starting…” And they would say, “Oh, we’ll be there soon!” and I would say “Oh, no!
We’ll wait for you to come!”
I grew up dancing at Houston Ballet and playing piano, so I had an early introduction to some
classical performance forms. But I don’t know that I ever thought I was going to be anything but
a theater artist.
You went to Kenyon College. Did you study theater there?
I did! I was a double major in English and Drama. Then I did a professional theater internship
straight out of college in Memphis, Tennessee. My parents had said, “We’re happy for you to be
an actor, but we’re not going to pay for it.” So I immediately started looking for opportunities
where I could keep working in theater without having to pay for it. I got called back for an
interview for the graduate program at NYU, but I was always attracted more to a holistic
approach to theater – I was training and working as an actor, but never thought of myself as just
an actor. There’s a point in your career where you either say “I’m going to become a serious
actor and move to New York”, or you think about a life in theater a bit differently. For me, that
meant moving to Chicago and starting a multidisciplinary ensemble called Striding Lion with
some friends and teaching theater and working freelance. Then, when we moved here nine
years ago, I started the Catamounts to keep working in that same way. So my theater career
has been a kind of a hyphenate: as a director and artistic director running a small theater
company – and then working as an actor and director, both within the context of the companies
I’ve run and freelance.
What brought you to Colorado?
My family moved here when I was in high school. When my daughter was born, my husband
and I weren’t sure we wanted to raise her in Chicago, and he decided to go to law school and
got into the University of Colorado. We waited to see if we could have the kind of life here that
we wanted. That’s been mostly a successful experiment. When I started the Catamounts and
realized that I could do the kind of work I was doing in Chicago, it was actually more interesting –
a more needed voice. My voice is super influenced by my ten years in Chicago, and my work is
different than a lot of what is being produced out here.
I really think there’s no better theater town in the USA than Chicago. The things I love about
theater – its inventiveness, and it’s live-ness, and its intimacy, and its ability to stretch the
imagination with very little resources into whole worlds – Chicago does that better because the
resources are easier to garner there. When we were back this summer I was like, “Every
neighborhood you’re in there’s a storefront theater.” Every neighborhood!
My company in Chicago was an interesting thing. We were boundary-pushing because we were
already producing site-specific work at time when not many others were. We adapted a Frank
Zappa opera for a bar that was life-changing for me. People lost their minds! We crammed
people in until we couldn’t cram them in anymore. But it was a hard process to codify.
Ultimately the musicians didn’t want to rehearse as much, and the dancers wanted more
technical dances, and the theater artists felt like some of the dancers couldn’t act. It was a great
and worthwhile experiment, but I don’t know if we figured out how to have an interdisciplinary
company successfully. It’s one of those interesting things, the ideas behind it are really solid, it’s
just the product was a little too much of a pastiche.
Speaking of the Frank Zappa opera, music seems to play a big part in your work. You did that,
and you directed the musical “The Wild Party”, and your husband is a music director and you
worked together in Chicago.
Yes, we did, we taught together as a team and we made work together. Yeah, the music thing is
so fascinating. I was a dancer first and was trained in music and dance before I was trained in
theater. Those are super early voices for me and they’re really ingrained in who I am. When I
direct a straight play I tend to choose work that has some musicality to it. I always hear plays
before I see them, in my head. I hear the pacing of them, I hear the rhythm of them. I think I
might have been a musician if I’d had the aptitude, but it was really clear early on that what I
was gifted in was theater.
The beauty of theater is that it started out as an art form that had music and dance in it. Its very
earliest iterations are multidisciplinary. I find work like that to be more exciting than just two
people talking in a living room. When music is integrated into a play, it automatically pushes it
out of realism, and I’m super interested in non-realism.
What strikes me about your concept for “Rausch” is that it makes total sense in the progression
of your work. You’re working with the immersive dance and performance group Control Group
again, and people were calling “The Wild Party” the first immersive musical, and you’re doing
immersive theater with your own company, the Catamounts, for the first time. I guess that’s the
flip – you’ve got familiar elements, yet it’s still a big leap.
And it’s outdoors! As if it weren’t already challenging enough. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely
right, it’s a progression of a lot of different aspects of my career. I’ve now worked on two giant immersive projects, “Sweet & Lucky” in 2016 and The Wild Party in 2017. And when you start to
conceptualize immersive work, your peripheral vision suddenly has to grow, and your
conception of the environment comes from something that’s more than a proscenium stage, from
what is happening all around. I saw some pictures today of “The Wild Party” and I was so struck
by how beautiful they are. There is so much depth to them – there’s something happening in the
foreground, there’s something happening in the mid-ground and in the background. Having that
immersive brain on right now and then conjuring back those devising techniques is for sure an
accumulation of a lot of work.
I feel like the direction we’re heading is really exciting. We’re already crafting this piece to be
audience-centered – which to me is one of the really key elements of immersive work. How it is
at all moments thinking not about the audience as a passive observer but integrating them, even
when they are just watching. How are they part of the stage picture, part of the moment that’s
happening? And I think we’re doing a really good job of that so far. We’re thinking about the
journey that an audience can have, even if it isn’t in the same order every night (because it
won’t be). It’s a challenge that all roads have led to me being up for.
I heard you in an interview say that you didn’t want to give away the surprise of the show you
were directing. Is there anything you can tell us about “Rausch” in advance?
Sure! We’re loosely adapting the Persephone myth. When you do an immersive piece, it helps
to have a simple, even known story. I think that’s why “Then She Fell” [an immersive theater work
by Third Rail Projects in Brooklyn, the company that created “Sweet & Lucky”] is such a success
because everyone knows Alice in Wonderland. With “Sweet & Lucky”, it was such a simple story
about memory and the loss of memory and love and the loss of love, and I think people felt like
there was enough of a story without having it be too plot-heavy. Since the immersive form is
also visual and experiential, you need to have a story that is easy to wrap one’s head around.
So when we were looking for source material, the Persephone myth seemed to be a really nice
fit. We’re going to be outside, it’s going to be early summer, and Rausch is a German concept
which is basically intoxication, whether through loss of self in the outdoors or loss of self when
on a particularly potent drug. It has to do with dissolving the barriers of self and losing oneself to
something larger. A German concept of ecstasy and intoxication, combined with the idea that
there’s this mother who, every year when she loses her child, completely shuts everything down
and only brings it back when the child returns. The Greeks had a lot of rites of spring that were
basically about intoxication. We’re combining those ideas of the rites of spring and the
Persephone myth in an examination of when we love, and the inherent risk of loss that comes
with that, and our need to control it, and of our ability to let go sometimes and lose ourselves in
it. And also how that is paralleled in nature. There’s that need to be in control of nature and
understand nature and use nature for our own resources, but then also to give ourselves over to
the larger thing that it is. So that’s what we’re exploring – and challenging our audience to think
about the question, “can we love something and also not feel the need to control it?”
That makes me think of another aspect of your work. I’ve been to immersive theater events in
New York where people followed the action carrying their glasses of beer, and Ariane
Mnouchkine’s company in Paris served food before the performance as part of the whole
experience. At the Catamounts, you have made this connection between theater and sharing a
meal and a drink in order to create a complete experience. Will “Rausch” include food and
drink?
Yes! There will be food and drink incorporated into it. The audience will start on a bus. You
know, you get on a party bus when you’re going to Red Rocks, or on a river rafting trip, or to
some wedding or some adventure. You sit on the party bus and you drink. The whole prologue
to the piece is on that bus – it has to do with the ramping up for the going back under and the
welcoming back of Persephone and the rites of spring.
These two ladies in Texas were talking about the relative “immersivity” of some theater pieces,
and one of them joked about this immersive trope about always doing a shot at some point!
Which is totally funny, because in “The Wild Party” we had a moment when the doors flung open
and bartenders came in and the entire audience drank gin together.
I think there’s something to that. What the Catamounts are really trying to do with their work,
what I’m trying to do with my work, and what a lot of immersive theater is trying to do, is to break
that fourth wall completely. And there’s something about the communal experience of having a
drink or eating together that automatically makes the performers and the audience unwind in
one space together rather than “I am performing for you, at you.” I think that we’re really figuring
that out, and how to integrate that into the story. Of course, another great thing about the
Persephone myth is that Demeter is the goddess of the harvest and the one who controls things
growing or not growing – there’s this automatic point of entry to think about how food relates to
her character as well.
We’ve talked before about your experience of Fort Collins and what’s happening there. Is there
anything you want to share with the Fort Collins audience, or would you like to reflect on your
experience of being there?
I’m impressed with what’s happening in Fort Collins that I actually feel a dearth of here in
Boulder, which is that it feels like there’s an artist community that is eager for experimentation
and risk and DIY and things coming up through an ethos that’s driven less by institutions and
more by individual artists and artists’ groups. And that’s so exciting! Personally, I’m wondering
how I can I pay more attention to what’s up there. I would love for Fort Collins audiences to
come down here to see Rausch because it feels like your audience and community is already
marinating on these ideas. Art-watching is a muscle, right? If you watch certain kinds of work,
that’s what you’re prepared to process. But if you’re watching other kinds of work, then you’re
automatically going to be able to engage with them better than someone who is just going to
see realism on a proscenium stage. It feels like you guys are already creating that kind of work
together and sharing that kind of work with your audiences and that they’re primed for this next
modality of what theater can be. I’m like, come and engage with this work because I’d love for
us to be more of a statewide community – as much as we can be with geography being a limiting
factor. I just really think we’ll be able to do good immersive work if it’s being done in more than
one place. If it’s only being done at the Denver Center, nobody’s going to build their muscles in
that direction sufficiently to keep building the scene and building the experiences for audiences
who want more. And audiences want this kind of work, they really do. That I’m convinced
about. Now, can we create enough good work to keep them wanting it? That’s the question.
“Rausch” will open on May 25 on a party bus in a parking lot in Boulder. Willingness to lose
yourselves in something bigger strongly recommended. Visit thecatamounts.org/tickets to get
on that bus.