The evening of May 28, I joined around 50 other audience members in the old Macy’s parking garage, located at the corner of 30th and Walnut streets, for the opening night of “Uncontainable,” a genre-bending performance co-produced by 3rd Law Dance/Theater and the Catamounts.
The performance unfolds across six different shipping containers and in the negative space between them. Each container houses a distinct environment, animated by communal practices: listening to records, raising a toast, humming a song on a front porch or tossing coins into a wishing well. Katie Elliott, artistic director of 3rd Law, describes the production as “a mosaic of gathering rituals.”
3rd Law and the Catamounts are Boulder-based performing arts nonprofits known for experimental work in unconventional spaces. “Uncontainable” marks their second collaboration, following “Tiny Dictators and Tea Cups,” which took place at the Dairy Arts Center in April 2024.
The production’s unconventional setting also reflects a broader reality for local arts groups. Affordable rehearsal and event space remains a persistent challenge for Boulder arts organizations.
“As is true of all Boulder theater companies except for the Shakespeare festival, we don’t have our own dedicated performance space,” Amanda Berg Wilson, artistic director of the Catamounts, said.
The Catamounts currently operate out of The Studio, a coworking and event space at Pearl Street and Foothills Parkway. Berg Wilson said alternative venues have become an effective strategy for containing production costs.
“Both of us are professional companies,” she said, referring to the Catamounts and 3rd Law, “so all of our artists are paid professional wages. Between that and the cost of materials, it’s always a squeeze to do high-level professional work in an expensive town like Boulder.”
Site-specific productions also allow performances to resonate in ways not always possible in traditional theater settings. Repurposed venues foreground considerations of how art intersects with daily life. “We’re igniting these spaces where you wouldn’t normally see art,” Elliott said.
During the pandemic, 3rd Law staged a socially distanced performance in the parking garage next to the Cinemark theater, where audience members watched from inside their cars. The Catamounts, meanwhile, has mounted productions at farms, trailheads, public libraries and even on a golf course.
The idea for “Uncontainable” emerged in the wake of federal arts funding cuts. “I physically felt squeezed into a small space,” Elliott said. Inspired by the image of an old-school ViewFinder, she began imagining how to create the sensation of a big world glimpsed through a confined frame.
“After some of those shifts in funding,” Berg Wilson said, “we were joking, Let’s just do a show in a box.’”
Set in the former Macy’s parking garage at Twenty Ninth Street, the production’s themes of connection and presence unfold against the backdrop of a commercial district shaped by decades of redevelopment and decline.
Crossroads Mall opened on the site in 1963 and became one of Boulder’s primary shopping destinations. By the late 1990s, however, vacancy rates were rising and city leaders were debating its future. The mall closed in 2004, though Foley’s — formerly May D&F — remained open through the transition. The store became Macy’s in 2006, the same year Twenty Ninth Street opened as a mixed-use development.
“Shopping malls used to be gathering spaces,” recalled Berg Wilson. “I went to high school here and my friends and I would hang out at the Crossroads Mall! . . . Now malls are this strange artifact of a former way of doing business.”
The Macy’s on Twenty Ninth Street closed in 2022. Since then, Corum Real Estate has redeveloped the building into a mixed-use complex with office space and retail space. As of June 1, upscale furniture company Design Within Reach had opened in the retail space, but Boulder29 had yet to secure office tenants, reflecting broader vacancies in Boulder’s commercial real estate market.
The backdrop of redevelopment and underused infrastructure gives added resonance to “Uncontainable,” which asks: Where and how do we gather in the age of digital saturation?
“These are snakeskins,” declares Jason Maxwell, who plays Fischer, in the production’s opening monologue. Dressed in a candy-striped button-down and a plaid blue bow tie, Maxwell gestures toward the shipping containers and the silhouette of Twenty Ninth Street visible through the geometric openings of the garage. “Snakeskins shed by that mammoth serpent of commerce and food courts . . . ”
Rather than simply critiquing modern life or indulging in nostalgia, “Uncontainable” invites audiences into a tactile, participatory experience. “We’re re-imagining how audiences encounter live art,” Elliott said.
When I emerged from the final shipping container, night had fallen. Summer lightning flickered beyond the open edges of the garage. Inside, the concrete caverns echoed with applause and conversation — an overlooked vacant space, activated for an evening.
“Uncontainable” runs in the parking garage at 30th and Walnut through Sunday, June 14.
