124 PERFORMANCE BOOSTERS
Ashton hopes to make this venue, called ‘Te Sanctuary’, a seasonal favourite for local and national community theatres.
One of the big successes of 2021 was a small, grassy amphitheatre surrounding a lake in the middle of Crystal Palace Park in South London – a place of legendary concerts from the 1960s to the 1980s. Now a local charity is determined to restore its stunning corten steel stage, the Crystal Palace Bowl, constructed in the 1990s by Ian Ritchie Architects, in order to provide a year round venue. Te charity, Back the Bowl, has managed to crowdfund over £60,000 towards that end, as well as prove the demand for outdoor events here with a series of weekend concerts during August 2021, attracting audiences of around 10,000.
Campaign manager Oliver Marshall was inundated with requests from parties interested in using the space, with its pandemic-proof properties high on their list of desirable attributes. Marshall says: ‘We had loads of people that got in touch last summer, and they were interested in booking it for just those reasons. Tere are lots of theatre groups and promoters looking for covid-safe spaces. It would have been wonderful if we could have said yes to all of them.’ However, there is still major work to be done. While a temporary pontoon stage took care of 2021’s festivities, Back the Bowl aims to achieve year-round occupancy through a two phase refurbishment (see case study). Says Marshall: ‘We hope it will be a two speed venue: the big commercial festival in the summer, with big international acts and the whole amphitheatre as a ticketed arena; and for the rest of spring and autumn, community events. We have had interest from local schools, performing arts trusts and charities. We hope it can be the sort of thing you could come to on the weekend, have a picnic and watch free jazz in the bowl…We’ve had people express interest in things like yoga on the stage. We see it as almost like having a community hall but without walls.’ For the entertainments industry as well as audiences, the pleasures we have discovered of alfresco or nature-enriched live arts could be a game changer – with the added advantage of reducing risk of closure and cancellations should pandemic conditions return. For those of us who have sampled these joys, the beauty of experiencing live music or theatre immersed in the multi-sensory delights of a natural landscape is something we are not likely to want to give up soon. And bad weather is less of a hindrance than we used to believe – doesn’t everyone now have stout, weatherproof coats and boots, or at least a robust umbrella? When faced with the prospect of no live culture at all, dampness is less of a hindrance than we thought. For all that some of the world’s most iconic venues responded through 2020 and 2021 with amazing streamed and online content, what we
CASE STUDY CRYSTAL PALACE BOWL
Top right Back the Bowl has sought to restore the Crystal Palace Bowl in London back to its former glory as a place both for big festivals and community events
Right A series of weekend concerts in August 2021 attracted crowds of 10,000 people, proving there was still demand for large-scale events despite the pandemic
The site of legendary concerts by Pink Floyd (1971) and Bob Marley (1980), the landscaped amphitheatre in Crystal Palace Park resounded with live music in summer 2021, and again in 2022. 2021 saw the successful staging of a new open air music festival over four summer weekends, called South Facing. Featuring Max Richter, The Streets and Dizzee Rascal, it marked the first phase of a highly successful crowdfunding campaign, by local charity Back the Bowl, to revive this
outdoor performance space, and restore the much admired Crystal Palace Bowl stage that Ian Ritchie Architects completed there in 1997, but which has lain unused since 2010.
Inspired by the monumental sculptures of Richard Serra, the stage was designed for simplicity and acoustic effectiveness, its form that of an open book facing onto the lake. Says Back the Bowl campaign manager Oliver Marshall: ‘From an acoustics perspective, they were looking for a simple sculptural form which would project the music out, whether low amplification or no
RIGHT: LUIS KRAMER BOTTOM RIGHT: LUKE DYSON
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