Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival
Founded in 1987, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (HVSF) is a critically acclaimed, professional, non-profit theater company based one hour north of Manhattan, in Garrison, New York. The Festival has established a reputation for lucid, engaging, and highly inventive productions staged under an iconic, open-air Theater Tent overlooking the Hudson River.
In recent years, the Festival has also ventured beyond the Tent, touring its work to other venues throughout the Hudson Valley, transferring productions to other theaters and engaging its community through radical participatory art-making. The company began plans in 2022 to move from its longtime home to a new site in Philipstown, NY gifted by philanthropist Christopher Davis. The new tent designed by Studio Gang, is a permanent open-air structure envisioned as a gathering space for the community, a model for environmental sustainability in the performing arts, and a resource for other non-profit organizations.
To maintain the Festival’s tradition of unamplified voice, Threshold addressed how the tensile structure creates areas of acoustic focusing due to the geometry required for fabric to be rendered rigid. The proposed solutions include new reflectors, which will control focusing and distribute reflections evenly across the audience, and capping the oculus above stage with a secondary tensile form to protect again rain while filling in the acoustical negative space. Each concept was studied using acoustic computer modeling; this allowed the team to show how ‘rays’ of sound from a mid-stage voice interacts with the tent and reflects back to the audience.
Location
Garrison, NY
Owner
Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (HVSF)
Team
Acoustics and AV - Threshold
Architect - Studio Gang Architects