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The Magic of The Tent
Father's Day week in June, Greenville Chautauqua creates an old-fashioned setting where everyone can spend a summer evening listening to lively entertainment and hearing a great historical speaker debate the issues of the day. A big top tent is set up out-doors in a park-like public place to create a free and open forum for families, generations and the whole community to gather together and share their heritage. Bring your picnics. There's always music and other entertainment to start off the festivities. It's lively, interactive, experiential entertainment for the whole family.
"Blame it on the big top. Blame it on America's love of biography and longing for community. Blame it on a group of dedicated historical scholars who spread the word that history is alive and well and living in America."
The Show - It Makes You Think!
Chautauqua is a theatrical transformation of time, grounded in careful scholarship which magically transports you into the past. It is uniquely powerful because it combines the "suspension of disbelief" of Theater with interaction between the audience and the performer. A skilled Chautauqua performer takes you out of the present and into a previous era. Yet no matter how alien, you connect with that time because you engage in discussion with a person living in that time.
ACT I: A costumed performer speaks in the character's words stimulating questions
ACT II: The audience questions the historic figure who answers as the historic figure
ACT III: Chautauqua scholar steps out of character to answer questions that even the historical figure could not or would not have answered truthfully.
Here's a clip from last year to show you what you how it's done: FESTIVAL 2011
Historical Interpreters / Performers
Want to learn how? Enroll now for this June's Chautauqua Performer School.
It takes an extraordinary person to succeed on the Chautauqua stage: part scholar, part actor, and gifted in research and performance skills. A Chautauqua historical interpreter spends, at a minimum, two years researching everything the character wrote, everything the character read, as well as reading and evaluating secondary sources about the character.
On top of that the performer has to look, act, think and speak in their character's voice. And finally, in that sneaky way that all good teachers have, trick their audience into learning something while having a good time.
A Chautauqua program is unscripted and spontaneous. The character's own words and language style predominate with just enough left out to raise questions. The material is thought-provoking and stimulates the audience to question, to interact and to thirst for more. It's not Chautauqua performance unless the question period is the most dramatic and exhilarating part.
