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| May 5, 2006
Into The Mythic
BY DAVID TEMPLETON
“At one point there was five inches of snow on the dock as the firefighters were fighting our fire,” says Hardman, a longtime Marin County artist, and founder of Marin’s legendary Antenna Theater company. “It was a night of complete bizarreness. Everything went haywire. People were cleaning off the docks with snow shovels so they could avoid slipping while trying to fight this fire. Halfway through the fire, half of the fire guys got called away to go up to the Waldo Tunnel to help deal with all of the car crashes, then the hills of Sausalito were transformed into these gigantic sled runs. There’d been hail, snow, fire, runaway cars—everybody was asking, ‘Man! When does it start raining frogs?’ ” In the end, the Liberty was completely gutted throughout its interior, though it remains afloat alongside the dock, and looks deceptively unscathed (mostly) from the outside. The whimsically imposing white and black craft—a perfect balance of class and funkiness—now sits bobbing in the water with plastic and boards covering its windows and portholes. It smells strongly of scorched wood and toasted metal. The home that Hardman shared with his wife, former county Supervisor Annette Rose, is essentially totaled, and all of its residents’ personal belongings went up in flames along with it, with losses estimated at around $250,000. According to police reports, the Liberty caught fire some time between midnight and one o’clock. Rose, who was in the lower part of the boat when the fire broke out, managed to escape with the couple’s dog, Velvet. Hardman, who was in the boat’s pilot house, first made his way to the back of the boat, and once assured that Rose and Velvet had made it onto the dock safely, with the fire building by the second, fought his way through a window and, still in his pajamas, leapt into the freezing bay. The Liberty was uninsured, since, according to Hardman, no carrier would cover a boat of its age. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but preliminary reports suggest a wiring malfunction in the boat’s ancient electrical system. • • • • WITH THE FIRE now almost two months behind them, Hardman and Rose—longtime advocates for the preservation and maintenance of Sausalito’s fabled houseboat community—are still reeling with the shock and grief of losing a home so closely tied to their sense of identity and lifestyle. Currently staying at a friend’s house (a landlocked house, for what it’s worth), Hardman guesses that by summer they will be looking around for another home, hopefully one that floats. Whether it is a different boat or a refurbished Liberty, Hardman isn’t sure; for the time being, he’s keeping his options open. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Don’t fix up the Liberty,’ ” he says. “The boat’s a hundred years old. People seem to think it’s time for Annette and I to find a younger hull to start working on. Some people have suggested we build a brand new boat from scratch, which would be an interesting project for sure. But at the moment, I’m not sure what to do. I’m still in shock about it. I don’t know what to think and I’m not ready to know. We will end up on a boat, either the Liberty or something as close to it as possible. “The Liberty has been a dream boat,” he adds, “a perfect boat. It’s everything I ever wanted in a home. We’ve been living among our friends in our favorite community in the world. I’m not going to let go of the Liberty easily.” Putting everything into perspective, Hardman says he realizes things could have been much worse; after all, nobody died in the fire, and strictly speaking, all that was lost were material possessions. Yet, he admits that unscheduled crying jags still hit him and Rose at odd hours, and that sometimes, everything starts to feels as if it is happening in slow-motion. “I did a show years ago about posttraumatic stress disorder,” Hardman says. “I interviewed a lot of Vietnam vets, guys who were over there for months and years of hell. I experienced just 15 minutes of being in a fire and watching the boat burn, but those 15 minutes have left Annette and me in complete shock. It’s amazing how fundamentally shaken we are. After 15 minutes. I can’t even imagine what those Vietnam guys experienced after years up to their necks in war and death.” For now, Hardman is dealing with it all by concentrating his energies on his next theatrical projects, one of which—set for May 18 at the Bay Model in Sausalito—will be a major fund-raiser aimed at assisting him and Rose in starting over. Not surprisingly, it will be a show—and an epic one at that—a theatrical event with heaps of spectacle and perhaps a big helping of emotional closure. Titled The Night of Fire and Ice, the shindig will include all the usual fund-raising elements—a live auction, a silent auction, no-host bars—and will feature a major performance in which Antenna Theater pulls out elements of its most famous and infamous shows from the last 25 years. “It’s going to be a big show,” Hardman laughs. “We’re hauling everything out for this. We’ll have 15 performers, at least, in the show itself, and a lot of other performers doing things throughout the evening. Art is about life, and what I’ve always done is take the ups and downs, the light and the darkness of life, and then try to find and celebrate the art in those moments. I don’t know how else to handle a tragedy like this except to make a big show based on it. “People should come,” he adds. “It’s not just a benefit kind of thing. It’s a full-scale entertainment, an enormous visual spectacle. We’re pulling out all the stops, collecting pieces from throughout our history as Antenna Theater, and involving a whole lot of our friends.” • • • • THIS MORNING, HARDMAN is at Fort Cronkite, the former military bunker, where he has maintained his workshop for seven years as part of his association with the National Park Service’s Partners in the Park program. Over the years, Hardman and his crew have done, and continue to do, a lot of innovative interpretive work for the park service, the most famous example being the audio tour of Alcatraz’s Cell House. Antenna Audio—a side project of Antenna Theater—is a world-renowned production company developing Alcatraz-like audio tours for museums and parks including the Vatican, the New York Met, San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and Graceland. Under Hardman’s direction, the company, which was sold about four years ago, is now the leading creator of audio tours in the world. Within the walls of this tool- and prop-jammed workshop, Hardman has launched a spate of non-theatrical projects. Slotology is the name he’s given to a series of artworks and furniture items made of odd-shaped wooden puzzle pieces that fit together as two dimensional, hang-able works, but also come apart and can be reassembled as tables, chairs and sculptures. Another project is the ECOlogical Calendar, Hardman’s first foray into publishing; designed as an alternative to the traditional month-by-month, 30-boxes-clumped-together calendars, the ECOlogical Calendar (www.ecologicalcalendar.info) is arranged to highlight the shifts and blendings of the seasons of nature. On this particular morning, slightly foggy over the adjacent lagoon, where the sounds of sea gulls, red-winged blackbirds, mourning doves, clashing waves and buoy bells mingle together and beachcombers walk their dogs and children, Hardman is overseeing the accumulation of giant props and costume pieces, bits and parts that have all played roles in past Antenna Theater productions, and will now be used again in the upcoming Night of Fire and Ice. He points at an oversized papier-mâché mask of a stylized French chef, complete with paper hat. Even lying sideways on a table, without a body, it conveys a distinct aura of comic condescension. “Our cooks are going to be walking around serving all kinds of foods,” Hardman explains. He indicates a number of dancing fish costumes used in one of his first-ever shows. There are also the personifications of Fate, various storm monsters, lightning bolt and a dancing bear. A dancing bear? “There’s an unwritten rule of these kinds of shows,” says Hardman, laughing. “Every time it snows, you have to have a dancing bear.” In the middle of the workshop, he gestures to a series of slotted, skeletal robots, creepy critters that will be popping up here and there throughout the event, which will be highlighted, in true Hardman fashion, by a staged, stylized re-creation of the night the Liberty burned. “We’re going to actually bring the Liberty over to the Bay Model,” Hardman says, “She’ll be our stage, floating on the water, and we’re going to re-create the whole event in major mythic, major theatrical mode.” Major mythic. Major theatrical. He’s not exaggerating. “The King of Fire is going to appear and light the boat on fire,” explains Hardman, “and the King of Wintertime will show up to make it snow and hail and coat everything with ice.” Creating the effects of fire and ice will be an arsenal of smoke machines, wind machines, costumed actors, live fire dancers, masks and puppets, propane rockets—the usual Antenna Theater stuff. “And this is going to be epic,” Hardman says. “We’re still in a lot of pain, and we’re pouring our hearts into this. It feels like a big story and we want to tell it big. The dancing fish will even be involved. Gotta have the dancing fish.” • • • • SINCE THE LATE 1970s, when Hardman hitchhiked to Marin from Los Angeles, a teenager with big ideas (and even then, a mind set on someday living on one of Sausalito’s famous houseboats), Hardman has been looking for unique ways to blend the beauty and inventiveness of art with the sharp-fanged, wildly dangerous wonder of life. His first theatrical company, formed with friends from Marin, was called Snake Theater, and their first production was a mystical, World War II-themed spectacle staged on Rodeo lagoon, just outside where he now has his workshop. “That show had a theme of sailing away,” he recalls. “And it had a masked woman with her hair blowing back out on the top of the hill there, looking out to sea. It took place at sunset, on the beach, and the whole audience went down to the beach to watch the sunset with all these characters acting out this story. That was the first time we used dancing fish. It was pretty wild.” Though Snake Theater did not last long, those early efforts established Hardman’s reputation as an innovative theatrical stylist with an unorthodox soul and a bold, daredevil sense of vision. He formed Antenna Theater in 1980, and after experimenting with a few more of the mask-and-pageantry shows, stumbled on the technological doodad that would define Antenna Theater for the next 25 years: the Sony Walkmen. As soon as those portable tape players hit the market, Hardman and company began looking for ways to incorporate the auditory gizmos into his performances. The first show Hardman put on using Walkmen was High School, staged at Tam High in Mill Valley. It was a pioneering moment in theater, and instantly established Antenna, and Hardman, as significant purveyors of visceral, convention-defying art. “I’m pretty sure that was the first Walkman performance ever given on the planet,” he says. “A lot of others have done it since, but we were the first.” In High School, audience members donned individual Walkmen to hear taped descriptions and declarations of high school life. As audience members listened, they followed chalk lines marked on the cement, lines that led them in and out of hallways, bathrooms and anointed hangout spots; the voice in the earphones gave them the real inside scoop as to what being a high-schooler in Marin in the early 1980s was really like. What was interesting about that show, Hardman points out, is that the student who was interviewed for the piece, though he told them all about “his whole cultural life and wild social existence,” only mentioned the word “teacher” once; and except for one visit to the drama classroom where that student spent much of his time, the chalk line never entered any of the school’s classrooms. Says Hardman, “That’s when I first realized that you could do these amazing shows using interviews and Walkmen, that you could take your audience and put them in other people’s shoes, have them experience—from the inside out—what other people are experiencing. You can record interviews with people about their lives, put that interview together and stick it in a Walkman, put that Walkman on a different person’s head and send that person into the first person’s house or workplace or other environment, and let them walk around, open all the doors, look in all the drawers, and play out another person’s life.” Over the years, Hardman has created other “episodes” in what is now an ongoing High School series; in September this year, Antenna will stage another variation at Berkeley High School, in Berkeley. The company is already hard at work on pulling that piece together. “The nature of Antenna is to put people in places that they don’t usually go,” he says. They’ve done shows where people become streetwalkers, shortchange waitresses and rob liquor stores. “The nature of Walkmanology,” he explains, “is using our audience to be the performers. You are observing the experience using all of your senses, and you are also creating the performance as you move through these series of actions. It’s an interesting dichotomy that doesn’t exist in other performance mediums, and it is essentially unique. Our shows create quite a powerful soup of emotions and multiple aspects of the human experience, being brought to bear at the same time, your audio world, your visual world, your physical walking world.” In 1985, Antenna created a series of pieces for an event titled Fair Play, a show made up of little events and performance moments based on the history and culture of San Francisco. In the show, participants donned headsets and stepped up onto a succession of low stages where they would perform whatever motions, pantomimes or activities they were instructed to do via the headset and tape. Each stage represented a different part of San Francisco, and each set of instructions was designed to put the participant through some uniquely San Franciscan experience. One of those experiences was jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. “You would step up onto the stage that resembled the bridge,” Hardman says. “There was this part that was only about a foot off the ground, and you would be told, as you listened to the tape, to step over the railing and jump, and there were pillows you could fall onto and lie there listening to the rest of the story.” That piece, which Harman called Jump, has a profound impact on audience members; over the years, Antenna has resurrected the show, using that original tape, for command performances. Last year, however, Hardman acquired his first iPod, and began to think about all those experiences he’s been putting out there in the world. “As I began getting interested in all the ramifications of iPodism,” he explains, “I began to realize that, because of computers and iPods and the ability to take recorded information and send it around the world uncontrollably, my recorded pieces could easily end up out in the ether, being used and transmitted beyond my control or awareness. I didn’t want that happening with a piece about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I don’t like the idea that someone could end up with my Jump piece in their iPod, actually walking across the real Golden Gate Bridge, listening to this motivational tape we created giving you commands and instructions telling you, “Climb over the railing, now stand there and look all around you—now JUMP!” In response to these musings, Hardman elected to lock the tape away forever, and in true Antenna Theater style, decided to mark the occasion with the world’s first “non-release party.” That event took place April 1, and was an invitation only event held at a secret location. “We played the tape for the audience that came to celebrate the history of the Jump project,” Hardman says. “We all listened to it together, and then we put it in the vault. We’ve taken all copies of it, removed it from all sites it might have been on, and sequestered it as best we can, so it is out of the public domain. It’s a very powerful tape.” Affirming his concern about the potential of some people misunderstanding the difference between theater and reality, Hardman says, “There’s a lot of reality in theater, but there is also a lot of theater in reality. The Golden Gate Bridge has always had a special theatrical draw to it—and a lot of that has to do with death. Most people have a will to live, but there’s also a strange nature in humanity that when a lot of people get out on a high building or a cliff or the edge of the Grand Canyon, some part of them says, ‘Gee, I could just go on out over this edge here, couldn’t I?’ It’s a part of our DNA structure, and the Jump tape had a dramatic way of tapping into that experience. “I’m very glad we did Jump when we did, and now I’m glad to have it locked away.” • • • • DEATH, AS HAS often been pointed out, is a big part of life, something that Hardman’s work has always hinted at. In the upcoming fund-raiser, which is very definitely intended as a celebration of life, Hardman explains that death is still an important element, since the close-call potential for loss of life is unshakably linked to the events of March 11. “Here’s our cop,” he says, patting an officious-looking mask decked out in ready-to-rumble action wear. “The cop will show up to figure out what happened with all the cars sliding and crashing down the street. “And here, here’s the bad guy.” Hardman stops in front of a large, metallic-tinged costume piece, all sharp edges and patchworked ferocity. “This is Mr. Death, who works for the Marin Recycling Company. He’s going to come by to see if Annette and I died. He’s hoping we’re dead so he can throw us in the recycling bins and send us back to where we came from.” Hardman picks up Mr. Death, and turns the glittering head to stare the mask straight in the eyes. “The show has a happy ending. Mr. Death will be frustrated, of course, in the end,” Hardman says, “because, thankfully, Annette and I, and the dog, all survived. So there’s the happy ending—we lose the beloved boat, we lose our home, but Mr. Death goes away empty-handed.” Hardman gives the mask a final once-over, and sets him back down. “He’s out there waiting, of course,” he concludes with a smile, waving toward the beach outside, and the county and world beyond. “Mr. Death will get us someday. But this time, he missed us.” ‘The Night of Fire and Ice’ will take place Thursday, May 18, from 7-10pm, at the Bay Model Visitors Center, 2100 Bridgeway, in Sausalito. All tickets are $20, and must be reserved by May 15. To reserve space or find out more, visit www.marinsbest.com/fireandice. Donations to the Rose/Hardman Boat Fund can be sent to 1001 Bridgeway, Box 105, Sausalito, CA 94965. PHOTO OF CHRIS HARDMAN BY ROBERT VENTE |
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It was snowing at sea level over Sausalito the morning of March 11, 2006, just after midnight, when the Liberty—the iconic 100-year-old tugboat that had been Annette Rose and Chris Hardman’s home for over 10 years—suddenly caught fire and (in the words of Hardman) “burned like crazy” along the slippery, snow-covered docks of Galilee Harbor. As the grand old boat burned and firefighters struggled to haul hoses down to the docks, the roads and highways of southern Marin were becoming so slicked over with hail and ice that cars had begun spinning out of control. A pileup on 101 near the Waldo Tunnel killed two motorists, blocking the freeway for hours. The same night, a dozen or so parked cars started sliding down the steep and icy incline of Sausalito’s Napa Street, causing an eerie automotive avalanche, a pileup of fender-bendered hybrids and minivans at the bottom of the hill. In the middle of all the snow and ice and chaos, there was the fire on the Liberty, which the Sausalito Fire Department was forced to tackle under unheard of circumstances. |
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