A performance built from our dependence on one another. The Fever is a public convergence for today, asking how we assemble, organize, and care for the bodies around us.
Originally commissioned by The Public Theater. World premiere 2017 at the Under the Radar Festival in NYC and subsequently performed in over 25 cities around the world.
PREMIERE:
January 4-15, 2017: Under The Radar / The Public Theater
2017:
Festival of Internat’l Theater Sibiu (Sibiu, Romania)
Festival Theaterformen (Hannover, Germany)
Noorderzon Festival (Groningen, Netherlands)
Zuricher Theater Spektakel (Zurich, Switzerland)
Torn Space Theater (Buffalo, NY)
Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL)
American Repertory Theater (Boston, MA)
The Arts Centre (Abu Dhabi, UAE)
2018:
Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN)
BYU Arts (Provo, UT)
University of Florida Performing Arts (Gainesville, FL)
Stanford Live (Stanford, CA)
AT&T Performing Arts Center
Clarice Smith Performing Arts (College Park, MD)
Carolina Performing Arts (Chapel Hill, NC)
Kimmel Center (Philadelphia, PA)
Luminato (Toronto)
MESS Festival (Sarajevo, B/H)
Dublin Theatre Festival (Dublin, IR)
Woolly Mammoth (Washington, D.C.)
2019:
Williams College (Williams, MA)
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)
Portland Ovations (Portland, ME)
The Public Theater / La Mama ETC / Onassis USA’s Democracy Festival (NYC)
Spoleto USA (Charleston, SC)
2020:
PuSH Festival (Vancouver, Canada)
“A POETIC EVOCATION OF OUR MOSTLY UNSPOKEN — AND UN-CALLED-UPON — DEPENDENCE ON ONE ANOTHER.”— THE NEW YORK TIMES
“BOLD AND DARING … A RITUAL THAT TAPS THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE, THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE.” — EXEUNT MAGAZINE
“explore the age-old relationship between performer and audience with an intensity and focus that is quite unlike anything I ever have seen.” — CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Created by 600 HIGHWAYMEN, in collaboration with
Brandon Wolcott, Emil Abramyan, Eric Southern
Written & directed by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone
Original music by Brandon Wolcott and Emil Abramyan
Production design by Eric Southern
Originally performed with Marchánt Davis, Jax Jackson, Tommer Peterson
Subsequently performed with Nile Harris, Bryan Saner, Ita Segev, Caroline Kittredge Faustine, David Glover
Original Production Manager & Lighting Supervisor: Will Delorm
UTR Producing Associate: Madeline Barasch
UTR Stage Manager: Joanne Pan
Touring Production Stage Manager: Olivia Edery
Special thank you to Andrew Kircher of The Public Theater.
Many additional people were instrumental to the creation of this piece, including:
Eliah Eason, Michelle Fetterly, Rocka Jamez, Laura Jellinek, Lucy Kaminsky, Griffin Osborne, Ita Segev, Jason Shelton, & Nathan Tempro
Originally commissioned by The Public Theater, THE FEVER was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New York Theater Program. The Fever was supported by residency partnerships with the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts with ASU Gammage; the 2015 Sundance Institute Theater Lab at MASS MoCA; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space program; a Watershed Lab residency at Mount Tremper Arts, with lead support by the National Endowment for the Arts; NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing; The Wexner Center for the Arts; Park Avenue Armory; On the Boards; and St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church. Touring to Noorderzon Festival & Zürcher Theater Spektakel is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Howard Gilman Foundation.
“The New Thing”: Three Axes for Devised Theatre by Tony Perucci in Theatre Topics, Volume 28, Number 3, November 2018, pp. 203-216 (Article)
“In The Fever, co-directors Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone investigate the question of “community”: how one constructs a community, as well as what kind of ethics and responsibilities that entails. Audience members are asked to perform simple tasks alongside actors, in which their participation constructs the actuality of the question of community within a distinctly theatrical frame … The key questions driving the performance: What does it mean to be responsible for another person? How do we meet or fail to meet this challenge in any specific instance?”
“The Collective Contagion of 600 Highwaymen,” by Rachel Anderson-Rabern in American Theatre Ensembles, ed. Mike Vanden Heuvel. New York: Methuen Drama (forthcoming January 2021)
Rehearsing Empathy in 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s The Fever
By Ira S. Murfin, Interdisciplinary PhD in Theater and Drama, Northwestern University.
“Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, of the performance group 600 HIGHWAYMEN, make theater that depends on the conditions of live performance. Their work feels less like a theatrical production than like a carefully orchestrated convergence…These performances affirm live theater’s essential sufficiency. Everything we need is already there. This is theater for lean times, art to survive the death of arts funding, experimental performance built to preserve and nurture a humane seed of communal cohesion for such time in the not-so-distant future when it will be most needed.
I saw 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s newest work, The Fever, as part of the Under the Radar Festival earlier this year at the Public Theater in New York. The performance begins as a tabula rasa, as close to nothing as it can get—just an empty room, not even a theater, with a single row of closely set chairs arranged in a rectangle around the edges. Then, without indication that the performance has begun, someone in one of the chairs starts speaking. She asks the rest of us to do something simple … and we do…
They ask us to perform actions, both abstract and pragmatic—one at a time, in small groups, sometimes all together. At certain moments a tipping point is reached, and no one as to be asked to do anything, we lust spring into action. We are all dependent on one another and The Fever is dependent on us; we must each keep agreeing to continue in order to keep it going. We are practicing being ready to help each other. … And we do.
For all of its sincerity and unsentimental good-heartedness, however, 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s makeshift utopia is not without its dark corners… The model of community that The Fever enacts also models the limits community requires: someone must always be excluded. Identity categories are introduced—age, gender, race—and alliances shift accordingly. As people are called out and in, lines of inclusion and exclusion form and re-form around and between us. Everyone is left out at some point, by chance or design, but everyone gets to feel the power of inclusion at some point, too. Inevitably, a few people keep chasing that power, jumping into the fray and trying to beat everyone else there. A sound cue swells and the light changes as if a storm has passed close by, just missing us. We stay together. The delicate cohesion The Fever builds does not break despite powerful external forces. Those light and sound cues remind us, too, that this is all someone’s plan. Despite appearances to the contrary, someone is in control.
…
The Fever was imagined long before our most recent election, but it points to the danger
and possibility of this moment. 600 HIGHWAYMEN is using the tools of group mobilization to stage a rehearsal for greater empathy.
”
This article was originally published in ‘MCA Members’ Magazine,’ summer 2017.