Lost in the Meadow
Project Background
Lost in the Meadow was the first theatrical production ever presented on-site at Longwood Botanical Garden’s 40-acre Meadow Garden. Longwood Gardens is one of the world’s premiere horticulture display gardens, just outside Philadelphia in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
Commissioned and produced in partnership with People’s Light & Theatre Company (Malvern, PA) and funded through the Independence Foundation’s New Theatre Works Initiative, PearlDamour and MacArthur Genius Award-winning designer Mimi Lien were invited to use Longwood Gardens as a source of inspiration. We proposed a site-specific work focusing on the intersections of art, science, horticulture, natural beauty, and sustainability. The commission was designed to encourage the creation of innovative, artful work to attract new patrons to the Gardens and offer new perspectives about the land.
The site: Longwood Garden’s 40-acre meadow, seen here with the tower and megaphone in the distance.
Performance Description
Lost in the Meadow is a site-specific experiment that uses technology and distance to connect an audience to the natural world and each other. At a time in our evolution when we are most disconnected from the earth and, arguably, from other humans, we come to this meadow in community to listen.
Across a vast and daunting landscape, watching from afar and while wearing headsets, audiences witness sets of characters trying to connect, persevere, and determine a way forward. Invisible to each other, each pair struggles to complete a shared pilgrimage as their conversations play out intimately in our ears. Meanwhile, orange-vested workers hoist an enormous megaphone up a 60’ tower in another part of the meadow, then plug it into the earth. As the piece climaxes, the once-distant figures are now up close with the audience, urging us to remove our headphones. The fourth wall is broken, and the disconnect shatters. It’s an unexpected and emotional encounter. Together, we listen as sound emanates from the giant megaphone. As darkness grows, the meadow itself seems to be singing. What can we hear it say about survival? About being a tiny human within a vast cosmos, traveling separately and together across our shared foundation and common ground, the earth?
Video
Because of the performance scale, it was impossible to video this show. Here, photo documentation is accompanied by audio excerpts from the performance:
CReative Team
Created by PearlDamour
Direction Katie Pearl
Script Lisa D’Amour
Scenic Design Mimi Lien
Sound Design Nick Kourtides
Composer Brendan Connolly
Musicians Yarn/Wire
To view the program, click here.
Community Engagement
Lost in the Meadow gave me the opportunity to crack open the silos that traditionally define civic cultural landscapes, using our process to build a new, invested community of Philadelphia-based theater-makers and Longwood Gardens staff. I have learned the strength of a community is directly tied to the amount of need members of that community have for each other. The combination of the extremity and scale of our site, the audacity of our creative vision, and Longwood’s investment in both the project and the health of the garden itself meant artists, horticulturists, and engineers came together in deep reliance and appreciation of each other to create this site-specific, technology-based work.
Press
Matt Caprioli/photography by Cole Wilson, PearlDamour’s Lost in the Meadow, Chance Magazine, issue 6, 2020
Support
A commission of People’s Light & Theatre in partnership with Longwood Botanical Gardens, funded by the Independence Foundation’s New Theatre Works Initiative.