HIVE 2021: Flight Paths finds new ways to keep micro-performances buzzing
The 12-member collective has come up with four digital streams to connect with individual audience members: Phone, Home, Travel, and Location
The HIVE Performance Collective presents HIVE 2021: Flight Paths from July 1 to 4, 2 to 5 pm
JUST LIKE honeybees do, the artists of the HIVE Performance Collective have been in hibernation—only, in this case, the hiatus has extended almost two years.
Forced to cancel one of their much-anticipated micro-performance extravaganzas last spring, the 12-member collective at first held out hope that live audiences would return at some point during the last pandemic year. When it became clear that wasn't going to happen anytime soon, the group started the difficult process of imagining just how its unique audience experience could possibly be re-created digitally. HIVE events, first launched in 2006, take over a space, dividing it into small parts for theatre artists to stage performances, and sending audiences through its busy hive of activity, show by intimate show. Past incarnations have filled the nooks and crannies of spots like the Russian Hall, the Chapel, and—in the last rendition at the Magnetic North Festival in June 2019—at Presentation House Theatre.
“We, as producers of this event, had to think of digital constraints that could allow for the multiplicity of aesthetics that the collective comes with,” explains producer Brian Postalian, of Re:Current Theatre. “Some people are going to want to do a text-based piece and some are going to want to have more movement….We had to find the parameters: how do you do this physical buzzing between performances but you're doing it at home? It was, and still is, a huge logistical challenge.”
The result of months of reimagining finally happens July 1 to 4, when theatre fans can tune in on their laptops or phones to build their own adventure, choosing a “flight path” between 12 different micro performances.
Instead of divvying up a physical space, HIVE 2021: Flight Paths producers have assigned artists four paths: Phone, Home, Travel, and Location. The last two will get you moving, the first through a space or walk of your choosing, the latter directing you to a specific location near you, from a body of water to a tree. Phone, meanwhile, will communicate entirely with you via your cell, be it through text message or voice call, while Home offerings can be enjoyed from your couch.
What you won't see is a straight-up Zoom performance. “No one was interested in that anyway,” says Postalian. “This was a great time for them to experiment with form and play, and everyone has kind of taken the challenge and just run in very different directions with it.
“I had no idea what people would come up with, but I kind of had a hope and a prayer that they would dream of something very different from one another,” he adds.
Postalian, of course, was right—innovation being HIVE’s buzzing purpose. Amid the maximum-15-minute offerings this time out: Life on Mars, the Nebula Company’s interplanetary chat roulette, in which two astronauts try to establish contact with someone on Earth; Little Thief Theatre’s Past Down, an audio play based on either a Persian, Welsh, or Greek myth that gives its audience member instructions about where to move to experience the piece; or Follow Me, unladylike co.’s phone-text-message piece that asks you to try to figure out who the mysterious person is on the other end of the conversation, and where they're taking you.
You can fit in about three shows per hour, from any stream, and HIVE invites you to experience each of its 12 works over several days. In another key component carried over from its live performances, where audiences mingle between performances in the space, the digital version attempts to “usher” guests from show to show.
“You're going to be guided through with automated text messages, like “It’s 2:30, get ready for your performance,’” Postalian says, “so you don't have to worry about clicking on six different shows. You're not feeling like once you're out of a show you're alone. It's cultivating digital space and digital community.”
Mostly, the event will try to create that interactivity, engagement, and intimacy that its mini plays achieve in-person.
“We're really deeply thinking about, ‘Why are you there? Why have we called you to this space?’” Postalian says. “That’s always important to think about when you're physically in a space together, but it's especially important when you’re digitally together—there's so many other factors and distractions and aesthetics that you can't control.”
More than anything, HIVE is one of the rare chances this year to see the work of independent artists who have been hit especially hard during the pandemic. Many have been forced into hibernation due to the COVID crisis and the way it’s shut down opportunities in theatre. And HIVE gives them a much-needed opportunity to collaborate with other theatre artists.
“To speak as a project-to-project-basis artist, the reality for an independent artist is very different than it is for folks like the Cultch or Arts Club or even the folks at Progress Lab who are on operating funding. And partially why we created HIVE is that almost all of us are artists who are not on operating funding,” explains Postalian. “So this event is a collective effort to make work that is upholding all of us together.” And in its attempt to connect with audience members in authentic new digital ways, HIVE hopes to keep its viewers going too.
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