Bouquet Theater facilitates theater. We provide places where practitioners who aren’t consistently treated like artists in the existing professional world can put together performances that feel meaningful to them on their own terms. We proceed with attentiveness, responsiveness, resourcefulness, and realism.

Material
We don’t have a house aesthetic. We don’t give ourselves artistic boundaries. Of course, you can’t help but repeat yourself if you make enough art, but the company is not defined in terms of the art. The company is defined in terms of how it supports the artists.

Collaborators
Collaborators condition the projects, the direction, the scale, the length of run, their own placement within the project, and whatever else they like. If we haven’t specifically identified a will among potential collaborators to work on something, we won’t do it, even if we think it would sell tickets. We also won’t work on anything we don’t like.

Audience
A lack of an audience won’t keep us from doing something. But, we won’t think like an entrepreneur. We’ll think like the host of a party. If we imagine 20 people might come if we invite them, we’ll invite them and set out 25 plates. We won’t set out 100 plates and try lots of schemes to generate demand. Marketing, for us, is just so that people know we’re here and know what we’re doing. That’s all.

Venues
A lot of venues are designed to be an inconspicuous canvas for an independent life of a show. Many venues have a deep connection to the work of a specific company or tradition. At Bouquet, we look for venues that feel active before we arrive. That’s not to say they have to be noisy or colorful places, but places where something is already going on. We don’t shy away from that. The areas available for putting something together are as much a part of the dialogue we try and facilitate as anything else.

If we genuinely work this way, we’ll scale down sometimes and scale up sometimes. We don’t mind that. We’re an extremely lean operation. We’ll grow when the pressure on the inside from collaborators and the pressure on the outside from audiences encourage us to do so, and when those pressures slacken, we’ll ease off and make smaller things.

Homepage image: View of a frosty evening through a window on a Scottish farm, by Michal Klajban. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.