New Old Time Chautauqua

W h a t W e D o

Vaudeville Show - Workshops - Parade - Community Shows - Regional Shows

We aim to delight, educate, amaze, and provoke the imagination of adults and children alike.

Our Summer Tours commonly involve 40 to 70 volunteers and are typically three to six weeks long. Our visit to each community generally lasts about three days. During each visit, our usual list of events includes a Vaudeville Show (or a few), numerous Workshops, a Parade and a smaller Community Show or two.

In an effort to keep our expenses (and, thus, our ticket prices) down to a minimum during our travels, we sleep in personal tents and collectively prepare our own meals.

Each Spring, to ready things for the Summer Tour, two members of the New Old Time Chautauqua travel to each of the performance sites and meet with the local nonprofit organizations who present our events to ensure the best possible advance preparations. At this time they survey the performance venue and camping accommodations, discuss publicity, and investigate travel routes.

Come mid-July, a large percentage of our company attends the Oregon Country Fair - outside of Eugene, Oregon - where we present a number of shows. By the way, our Chautauqua largely originated as a subset of the entertainers and support people at this Fair who wanted to "take the show on the road."

Once this magical Country Fair is over and, like Brigadoon, it sinks into the mists, we traditionally move on to another Northwest location to meet up with the rest of our troupe and spend a few days making final preparations and plans for the Summer Tour.

Then we hit the road.

We usually tour using a bus and a small collection of other vehicles. We bring along yurts (large round tents) for workshops, group meetings, and band rehearsals.

We are an entirely volunteer community. Some volunteers ("buckstoppers") take charge of making sure that specific things happen as needed. However, many activities on tour - such as setting up and tearing down campsites and show equipment, preparing and cleaning up after meals, and even putting on the shows themselves - are undertaken as community events within our group. To the degree that it is practical, members of our touring company commonly volunteer to help out with virtually everything that we do at one point or another.

In consideration of the environmental impact a group our size could have on locations we visit, we make a point of cleaning up our performing spaces and camp sites when we are done. We reuse or recycle what we can and see to the proper disposal of the rest.

Poster art by the beloved Rebo

Our Vaudeville Variety Shows generally last 2 to 2 1/2 hours and may include everything from comedy to juggling and tap dancing, from comedy to rap and aerial acts, from comedy to cowgirls and bubble-blowing, and from comedy to poets and magicians and rope-spinners and musicians and goodness knows what all - and have we mentioned how funny these shows are?

The Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra accompanies each performance with rousing music, sound effects and wisecracks.

We perform in theaters, parks, schools, community centers, baseball fields, or most any open space, to audiences commonly ranging anywhere from 200 to 1500 happy attendees.

An "Everybody's Welcome!" Parade

Parade in Tiny Train The Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra sounds Chautauqua's arrival in each community. The 20+ piece band leads the collective group down the center of towns, through intersections of society, across stages, into supermarkets, up mountains, through parks, over beaches, riding on mini-trains, and will never miss a chance to visit hot springs.

Before each tour, in an effort to make our parades as fun and inclusive as possible, New Old Time Chautauqua invites our sponsoring organizations, other civic and service organizations, clubs, dance troupes, and cultural heritage groups to encourage parade participation. EVERYONE can participate.

Children join in on their decorated bicycles, families march with pets, ladies ride on horseback, and giant puppets loom over the on-lookers. An unpredictable and never-ending assortment of outlandish characters accompanies our procession.

Community Shows

In each community we visit, NOTC brings an abbreviated version of our show to audiences who can't come to us. We target juvenile detention centers, nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions which have little or no access to live entertainment.

Part of our intention, in visiting these institutions, is to validate the existence of the individuals living within them as members of the larger community. These shows attempt to bridge the gap between isolation and hope.

We believe laughter is a powerful vehicle for healing as well as a birthright.

Regional Shows

In addition to the Summer Tour, our Chautauqua presents from three to eight regional Vaudeville performances annually - sometimes with Parade, Workshops and Community Shows, sometimes without. These performances exist for two excellent reasons:

the fun of getting our community together to entertain, confer, converse, and otherwise hobnob with our brother communities and
to raise money to support both our Summer Tour and our general operating expenses throughout the year.

Common locations for these regional shows include several cities and towns, stretching from Santa Cruz, California, to Bellingham, Washington.

• New Old Time Chautauqua •
• 615 54th Street, Port Townsend, WA 98368 •
• Phone: 360/ 385-2212 •

• Email: info@chautauqua.org •