For over a year, the Harris Theater has loomed like an abyss in the center of the Loop, darker and more cavernous than it’s ever been: no drinks in the lobbies, no coats in the checkroom, no tickets ripped, no programs leafed and loosed on the floor. No hum of human gathering, no line out the restroom door, no echo of exhaust in the parking structure, no us. Though it has opened its rehearsal studio and its stage for artists to create digital works and hosted a steady stream of virtual content, its 1,525 seats will remain empty until (according to the latest calendar) October.
Yet even without performing, the company has remained on the map through its Virtual Dance Lab, a series of online classes taught by Lucky Plush artists and dance artists in the city and beyond. “I think that that became logical when the pandemic happened,” says Rhoads. “I was already planning my cocurricular programming for the University of Chicago”—where she is a lecturer in dance in the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. “I’ve got all these teachers who are lined up to do cocurricular work, and they’re expecting to be paid, and I need to keep these students moving.
The deliberately low-tech first-generation 1980s Legend of Zelda-esque vibe of Gather.Town might be viewed as an extension of Lucky Plush’s prepandemic exploration of 1970s roller rinks in Rink Life. “It’s nostalgia for before everything was so in an electronic space,” suggests Rhoads. “There’s a familiarity to songs of that genre that even kids now know so well—classics, disco, or 80s pop—something anchoring about that across generations and across experience. I think there’s also something to imagining times when you’re just doing the thing and not watching yourself have the experience of the thing, or capturing a selfie of yourself doing the thing, that’s compelling.” v
Fri-Sat 6/25-6/26; ticketed online entry every half hour between 5 and 7:30 PM CDT, luckyplush.com, sliding scale $5-$50 ($25 suggested)
