For centuries, theatre has been a fairly static affair where the audience gathers in an auditorium and quietly watches an ensemble of performers. However, a local theatre group is on a mission to defy all of that.
SNAFU Society of Unexpected Spectacles prides itself in creating non-linear unconventional productions that appeal to a wider demographic. New Earth Bandits 2 is a reimagined presentation of SNAFU’s 2023 show that collaborates with artists and performers from the local community who were presented with the query “What is the world going to look like in 5,000 years?”
“One reason why we chose 5,000 years is we really wanted to give people an opportunity to dream up futures that were beyond where the world is right now, because the world right now feels very hopeless,” says SNAFU co-artistic producer Kathleen Greenfield. “There’s potential for hope if we think beyond our current kind of political structures. Five thousand years is an opportunity for the world to crash and be rebuilt a few times, so we’re really presenting potential utopias or dystopias.”
The show will feature community creatives in the fields of art, dancing, performance, acrobatics, music, building, and crafting who will each present their interpretation of the prompt. Compared to the original New Earth Bandits, this show improves on feedback SNAFU received about that show’s accessibility and ease of consumption, and features new interpretations of the same concept.
“Audience members move through the worlds, they choose their own adventures, and this whole world is created of possible futures that the audience can experience,” says Greenfield. “There’s also interactive games and singing, like learning a choral song together. We really wanted to create a 3D experience, an experience for folks who are neurodivergent, or folks who don’t love sitting down and watching theatre, to be able to choose their own adventure.”
Greenfield says interactive theatre that viewers can consume at their own pace in their own way is unusual, and it’s one of the driving motivations behind SNAFU’s artistic model.
“It’s a new way of seeing, a new way of experiencing theatre,” she says. “I especially like to target people who don’t usually go to theatre because they find it restrictive; this is like an immersive experience where you get to be part of the show, and I think that SNAFU theatre has always been that kind of thing.”
The event will be held in the battlements at Macaulay Point, and will be timed to occur during the sunset. Greenfield says the show is so expansive that it’s unlikely that the audience will be able to see everything in a single viewing, so they’re encouraged to return as many times as they would like, at a discount. She says that co-artistic producer Ingrid Hansen and herself want to experience something more immersive and vibrant than traditional theatre.
“Ingrid and I both really love to make theatre alive again, to transcend this idea that it’s just a piece of text that someone has memorized and is presenting back to the audience,” she says. “We dabble in puppetry, and clown, and physical theatre, and for me it’s because that’s what speaks to me… I feel enlivened when I see bodies moving, but I often don’t feel that same experience with text-based work or traditional theatre.”
New Earth Bandits 2
6:30 pm, various dates, Thursday, August 14 to Sunday, August 24
$20-$40, Macaulay Point
snafudance.com