Hosting Haymaker within the Layers of New Orleans

A Post by Lisa

Haymaker told me that they were making a piece designed for groups of people who already knew each other  — such as for an office on their lunch break, or a group of churchgoers after a service.

First, I tried to set up a performance for my Dad’s office at Xavier University — a 9 person staff who work to raise money for the university.  First, my dad said “sure”, then he said “oh no! I am going to out of town!”  Then a few days before he said “Wait!  I WILL be in town!  Let me email my staff and see who could come!”  And then 7 of the 9 people said they were way too swamped with work to be able to commit to a one hour lunch performance.  Mostly, this says something to me about the packed and often frantic life of working in a corporate or university office situation, so if you want to bring your performance to people, don’t assume you are doing them a favor, or giving them a special treat — theater may well be foreign to them and may feel like an “extra”.   The answer to this is, of course — ????.   Although my first thought is — what would a 15 minute for an office look like?  What would a 30 minute theater making class twice a month look like?  Working within limitations….working from the inside out.

In the end, I stayed within my comfort zone, and talked to the staff at Catapult (a rehearsal / office space for three predominantly caucasian, experimental theater companies) and Ashe Cultural Center (a theater / gallery / cultural center with a predominantly African American staff).  The Catapult performance was in the afternoon, and we offered snacks, the Ashe performance was right around lunch time and we brought pizza.

I think I will leave it to Haymaker to talk about their experience of the audience, but what struck me the most was the INVESTMENT AND EAGERNESS of each group — both to gather and watch the performance, and to stay after and talk about what they saw.  Both groups were primed to receive, in their own way, and also, I think, aware that they were seeing an in-process performance that was discovering itself, and that THEY were part of the discovery.

It was interesting, Catapult is an important nexus of experimental theater making in NOLA (which is also often community based).  Ashe is a nexus of Community Based theater in NOLA (which is also often experimental).  I felt like I was giving Haymaker a behind the scenes look of the intersecting gears of the NOLA theater scene — the many layers of engagement than make a theater scene tick.