Our Mission at The Magic Bus
The Magic Bus is the engine that powers the fundraising efforts of the Antenna Theater. Through the story we tell on our tours, we offer the Antenna Theater the freedom to continue providing its works to the public.
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 (Washington DC), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the Olympic Arts Festival (Los Angeles, California – 1984), the Spoleto Festival (Charleston, South Carolina), Tubingen University (Germany), the Cervantino Festival (Mexico), the American Cultural Center (Paris, France), and the Roundhouse (London, UK), 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, Performing Garage (New York City), the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (Ohio), the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles, California), Earth Drama Lab and Whole Earth Catalog (San Francisco, California), Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Marin, California), and KPFA Radio (Berkeley, California).
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.