Audience members will be taken on a journey to experience the lives of notorious gangsters “Bonnie & Clyde” during an Open Dance Project immersive multimedia performance Nov. 4-5 at Studio5 in Evanston.
The huge performance area is being subdivided into rooms with audiences moving through the space during the production.
Performances are 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. each night, with the audience limited to 40 people for each show.
Annie Arnoult, artistic director of the Open Dance Project, said that her company created “Bonnie & Clyde” as “a response to the gun violence and the mass shootings that we have been experiencing.”
She explained that the Houston-based company was in rehearsal for their last immersive show when they learned about a school shooting at a high school where they had done residencies. Fortunately, in this instance there were no fatalities. Other school shootings followed with worse consequences.
To create the piece, the company went beyond the pop culture versions of the story of the two gangsters and explored their actual history from primary sources.
“Once we started unpacking that real story, it became very clear that it was a story also of prison violence and abuse,” Arnoult said. They discovered that Clyde entered prison as a petty thief and came out a murderer. He committed his first murder when he was in prison.
She added that there is no doubt that Clyde was a murderer and Bonnie was his accomplice but we also need to “look at the social circumstance and look at the civic responsibility.”
The piece is also designed to make people question, “Now what? What mistakes that we were making back in 1932 are we still making today?” Arnoult said.
The show is driven by movement, the artistic director reported, but there is also speaking and singing.
The company brings in a complete set that includes a number of rooms. The audience walks through the entire set over the course of the show.
“They can be as close to or as far away from the action as they want,” Arnoult said. “In the actual set, there’s a little cafe that has tables and chairs and bar stools that they can sit on. You can sit on the benches inside the jail cell. You can sit on the car.”
Ten company dancers perform the high-energy show. Five dancers from Evanston Dance Ensemble are involved in the preshow when audience members get to explore the space before the performance starts.
“The Open Dance Project came out of my absolute love for immersive ensemble-devised work,” Arnoult said. “I really started exploring immersive work in 2006 back in graduate school at Ohio State University.”
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Arnoult noted that she had always “crossed over between dance and theater.” She began combining those two loves in her work.
When Arnoult, who grew up in Houston but lived in Chicago for three decades, moved back to Houston, she decided to make immersive experiences the focus of her company. Open Dance Project has created five immersive shows since it was founded in 2015.
“I’m the choreographic director and I bring the concepts and the overarching ideas but the pieces really are built collaboratively with the company members,” Arnoult said. “It is such a fun and generative process.”
“I have had professional experiences collaborating with Annie Arnoult,” said Béa Rashid, co-founder and co-artistic director of Studio5 with her husband Steve Rashid, as well as founder of Evanston Dance Ensemble and director of Dance Center Evanston. “She has taught at Dance Center Evanston and she has also choreographed as an artistic associate for the Evanston Dance Ensemble before she moved to Houston.”
Rashid noted that Arnoult brought a previous Open Dance Project, “Panopticon,” to Studio5 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Performances by that company work well at Studio5 because it is a flexible space, Rashid explained. “When the seats are closed, it provides for a larger playing area,” she said. “Since their production design calls for rooms to be built within the room, with the audience walking through it, our theater provides them the space to do that.”
‘Bonnie & Clyde’
When: Nov. 4-5
Where: Open Dance Project at Studio5, 1934 Dempster St., Evanston
Tickets: $36.82
Information: tickettailor.com/events/studio5performingartscenter
Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.