Last week, I had the fantastic opportunity to photograph Broken Planet Show at the Revival theater in Chicago’s South Loop.
Veteran Blue Man Callum Grant created Broken Planet Show with the goal of building community through laughter. Callum observes a world prone to tribalism, boundaries, and division; yet, on the most fundamental level, we all share the same emotions. Rather than creature divisions, Callum hopes to bring people together though a shared experience of laughter and interacting with the absurd. Saving the world with silly.
The Broken Planet website describes the show this way:
“The Absurd Cabaret of Apocalyptic Proportions.
Comedy, Circus and Indie Cosmic Lunacy
An ever-changing riot of world-class weirdos hellbent on healing our planetary divide.
Interactive, Uplifting, Subversive and Bonkers!”
As Callum put it in our initial conversation about the show, his hope is to poke fun at those divisions and poke fun at everyone equally to try and approach the subject with an immature humor and an introspective, reflective nod.
The topic of the show is near and dear to my heart, as it’s something I’ve thought about increasingly as I’ve observed communities become more polarized.
Building Community
Before the show, I went out to the lobby, where I ran right into Courtney Abbott and Michael Diaz (featured with Nerf guns in the photos below). Followers of The All Worlds Traveller might remember Courtney from the Bernhardt/Hamlet portraits we did in April. They introduced me to photographer Kate Smith, who had recently made studio portraits for Broken Planet show (some of which can be seen here) and who lives in my neighborhood! Now I have a new photographer friend.
And as I mentioned in Courtney’s entry, Courtney and Michael met at graduate school in the theatre program at Ohio University… where I went to school for theatre in the 1990s with another former Blue Man, who Callum knew and had worked with as part of Blue Man Group.
This is all to say that if Callum’s goal was to bring people together through the show, I certainly experienced it in spades.
Photography
Callum gave me a good overview of the delightful insanity that was bound to happen in the show, so I prepared myself to move.
Camera-wise, I finessed the usual challenges to photographing in dark spaces, balancing the exposure triangle of aperture, ISO, and shutter speed with the changing action of the performance, adjusting on the fly, with the additional factor of LED lights, for which I adjusted my settings to avoid banding, which I talked about last week photographing a different theater.
In addition, there are parts of Broken Planet Show that take place in total darkness, without any light except what the performers are wearing—the Mothman piece, for instance, in which the only thing the camera can capture are the glowing red discs that serve as the Mothman’s eyes.
Many moments of the show light up the darkness in delightful ways that are stunning to behold.
Audience Interaction
As the show progressed, I tried to capture moments of interaction. This being a show about creating a shared positive experience among the members of the audience, it seemed important to check in and see how that was going. I particularly enjoy shows that engage the audience, as I spoke about recently in The Terror Cottas experimental theatre group’s production of The Ostrich and anything Birch House Immersive produces. As with recent jobs photographing The Ostrich and Hitch*Cocktails, I laughed out loud while shooting Broken Planet Show, which is just my kind of weird.
At the end of the evening, I had a brilliant time running around in the haze photographing the cavalcade of god-clowns, apocalypse babies, dogs, cats, raptor ravers, obsessive safety cones, jugglers, mothmen, militant lovers, vacuum cleaners, and disco-ball-heads while dodging Nerf bullets. And this was only one iteration of this variety-style show, which changes cast and characters as different acts participate in different shows.
The Broken Planet Show web page includes some great video clips that allow a peek at the madcap happenings, but the best is to see the show live (which you can also find out about by going to the Broken Planet Show page).
Great thanks to Callum Grant for bringing me in to capture his weird, wonderful, bizarre, ridiculous, amazing, hilarious, wacky theatrical experience. Thanks to the referral from Britt Anderson for the referral, and to my old fellow photographer friend Greg Inda for the referral to Britt, and thanks to Courtney Abbott and Michael Diaz for introducing me to my new photographer friend Kate Smith at the show!
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