‘Uncontainable’ finds magic in an empty parking garage

3rd Law Dance/Theater and The Catamounts turn shipping containers into a moving meditation on connection.

Leave it to 3rd Law Dance/Theater and The Catamounts to create one of the year’s most interesting and artistically innovative works in a parking garage off Boulder’s Twenty Ninth Street Mall.

On paper, the ingredients for Uncontainable may sound like an immersive experience gone wrong: an old Macy’s parking garage, a cluster of shipping containers and an audience asked to wander into intimate rooms where anything might happen. If that premise gives you flashbacks to Darkfield, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ disastrous shipping-container experiment from a few years ago, worry not. This is a completely different kind of experience.

Running through June 14, Uncontainable is tender, strange and surprisingly hopeful dance-theater work co-created and directed by Amanda Berg Wilson of The Catamounts and Katie Elliott of 3rd Law Dance/Theater, with text by Jeffrey Neuman. Set in a near future where human connection has largely retreated into digital space, the piece imagines a renegade group of artists gathering at sundown to recover the intimacy of being together in real time.

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A scene from Uncontainable. | Photo: Michael Ensminger

“Discarded World”

After parking in the garage, attendees check in at a table before entering a circular performance area surrounded by shipping containers. Boyd Hamilton, the Twenty Ninth Street property manager, performs as Linus, playing live music as people settle onto benches.

Hamilton’s presence adds an intriguing twist to the evening. Though the piece is sharply critical of consumer culture and the dead zones created by commercial development, it unfolds inside a commercial district with the cooperation of the person who controls the space. That dynamic makes the work all the more compelling. Rather than just complaining about dormant urban space, Uncontainable is actively trying to wake one up.

The show begins with Fischer, played by Catamounts regular Jason Maxwell, riding in on a bicycle and speaking directly to the audience. “Glad you found us,” he says, before deciding that yes, the audience must have been looking for this place. “Yes feels right; yes is the beginning of something. And beginnings are what we need right now, more than anything else.”

That invocation gives the evening its philosophical frame. Fischer looks at the containers and calls them “snakeskins shed” by the “mammoth serpent of commerce and food courts and errands getting checked off a list.” It is a terrific opening image, both funny and brutal. These containers were once durable vessels, built to move goods from one place to another. Now they sit vacant, forsaken, “echoes of what they used to be.”

Neuman’s writing soars in passages like this, where metaphor and place snap together. Throughout, Neuman’s language is evocative and elevated, his characterization is razor-sharp and he expertly uses the setting to explore how an empty space can be refilled with meaning and purpose.

Uncontainable is performed in the old Macy’s parking garage in Boulder, Colo. | Photo: Michael Ensminger

Giving up the phone, entering the loop

Before the audience enters the main experience, Fischer and Meg, a librarian played by Andrea Camacho, introduce one of the evening’s central ideas: nostalgia may be overrated, but memory still matters. Sharing a memory, they suggest, is not simply nostalgia. It can be “re-creation,” and “re-creation is re-connection.”

In order to really be present, audience members are asked to give up phones in exchange for a ticket. The devices are tucked into numbered drawers in a card catalog, a wonderfully tactile image of old and new systems of searching placed in conflict. Fischer admits he has a phone, too, and loves what it can do. But, as he puts it, “access is not always experience,” and “connecting” is not always the same as connection. That distinction becomes one of the show’s animating principles.

From there, the audience breaks into groups and rotates through a series of containers, a looping structure The Catamounts have used before in immersive works such as Impossible Things and A Town Called Harris. Here, though, the loops feel less like narrative puzzle pieces and more like small rituals of attention.

In one container, audience members are invited to choose a vinyl record and perform the slow, manual task of playing it. In another, a dancer asks whether wishes are more likely to come true when spoken aloud or kept private. A porch-like space contains Paul, played by Jason Hauser, a musician losing his hearing who still finds purpose in playing. A library room invites visitors to choose a book and read. A bar scene lingers over the careful making of a drink.

None of these moments are particularly complicated on their own, and that is exactly the point. The containers ask us to slow down enough to notice the pleasure of process: dropping a needle, reading aloud, shaking an instrument, sharing a wish, muddling basil and strawberry into a drink. The actions are simple and small, but the accumulated effect is deeply moving.

A scene inside the shipping containers. | Photo: Michael Ensminger

Movement that supports the world

The dance is integrated with a light but thoughtful touch. Elliott’s choreography, created with the dancers of 3rd Law, is most prominent in the opening section and in several container sequences. In the vinyl room, dancers use the walls and confined space to create a physical response to the music. In the wishing room, movement emerges in a tub of water surrounded by flowing fabric, creating a more fluid, almost ceremonial energy.

The dancers contribute to the emotional temperature of each scene and manage the acting demands with ease. Immersive work can fail if the performers are unable to maintain a natural, direct relationship with the audience. Here, the cast sustains that intimacy without making it feel forced.

Maxwell brings warmth and urgency to Fischer, a guide who badly wants this fragile world to keep working. Camacho gives Meg a grounded intelligence, while Hauser’s Paul adds a melancholy undercurrent, particularly as sound from the outside world begins to intrude on the containers.

Those interruptions become more insistent as the evening continues. At first, they are a slight nuisance. Then they become impossible to ignore. Eventually, the noise coming from the card catalog makes clear that the outside world has not disappeared just because we put our phones away.

One of the dances in Uncontainable. | Photo: Michael Ensminger

A hopeful argument for recreation

That could easily become a scolding, anti-technology conclusion. Thankfully, Uncontainable is more generous than that. The piece does not pretend we can live forever inside a fantasy world of records, books, porches and handmade drinks. It does suggest that the values found there are not gone unless we surrender them.

As site-specific work, Uncontainable is a tremendous success. It activates a strange, dormant corner of Boulder with wit and purpose. It is not like much else you are likely to see this year, and probably not like anything these companies will make again. That ephemerality is part of the pleasure.

Together, 3rd Law Dance/Theater and The Catamounts created a refreshingly playful evening that takes audiences on a philosophical romp about the kind of society we want to live in. In a fast-paced technological world, that may be the most radical gesture of all: giving people the time and space to stop, listen and be with one another.