About Antenna
Antenna Theater of Sausalito, California is a non-profit arts organization which creates original work in many disciplines. Artistic Director Chris Hardman founded Antenna in 1980 to experiment with the essential dynamics of sound, sculpture and live performance.
Since then Antenna has created over two dozen original works, has won many Bay Area Critics Circle Awards, and has toured extensively. Antenna's work has been presented at the Smithsonian Institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Olympic Arts Festival, the Spoleto Festival, Tubingen University in Germany, the Cervantino Festival in Mexico, the American Cultural Center in Paris and the Roundhouse in London, among others.
The Antenna experience can take the shape of a carnival, an immersive maze, a performance piece, a radio program, a guided mystery tour, a sideshow or a giant walk-through sculpture. Antenna uses them all to put the audience member, or "audient," into the middle of the action.
Organizations that have commissioned Antenna to create work for a wide range of sites and media include: the San Francisco Performing Arts Festival, the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (Ohio), the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles), Earth Drama Lab (San Francisco), Whole Earth Foundation (San Francisco), Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Marin), and KPFA Radio (Berkeley).
In addition, Antenna has brought its unique combination of sound, image and movement to adventurous San Francisco Bay Area audiences in the most surprising of settings: a moving bus, recycling centers, high school corridors, Army barracks, the desert playa of Burning Man and the Pacific Ocean's edge.
The artistic director
Chris Hardman, Artistic Director / founder, ANTENNA THEATER, 1980-present.
Since 1980, non-profit ANTENNA THEATER has produced all audio, experiential, and performance works conceived by Chris Hardman. Internationally recognized for “Walkmanology” experiments—the use of the portable audio player as an actual performance tool—ANTENNA has produced more than thirty of Hardman’s original interdisciplinary pieces. ANTENNA’s “audients” (Hardman’s more active term for individual audience members) have found themselves inside immersive mazes, carnival-like environments, interactive installations, site-specific performances, radio programs, guided tours and giant walk-through sculptures. Past works have combined cutting edge audio technology with interview-driven sound designs, puppetry, masked movement, 3-D projections, sensor-tripped animation, sculptural objects, features of the natural landscape, and prefabricated environments.
Hardman’s ANTENNA has also transformed the audio tour into an artistic medium by applying Walkmanology principles to museum exhibitions and historic sites. Nearly all large museums world-wide and most prominent historic sites use Antenna Audio for their sound interpretation. This former division of ANTENNA is now owned by Discovery Communications.
Chris Hardman grew up in Los Angeles and went to Goddard College in Stowe, Vermont. There he worked with Bread and Puppet Theater, creating giant masks for street performances. His first commission was in 1970 re-designing and fabricating the fun house at Coney Island, New York. He then moved back to Los Angeles and then to Sausalito, California where he co-founded Snake Theater in the mid-seventies. Snake Theater was one of the pioneers in the Bay Area of site-specific performance with such productions as Somewhere in the Pacific, Ride Hard Die Fast, Auto, Her Building, and 24th Hour Café.