What Does a Custom Event Look Like with Danger Boat? (A Case Study)

What Does a Custom Event Look Like with Danger Boat? (A Case Study)

You don't have to come to Danger Boat knowing exactly what kind of event you want (although we do have a Product Guide if you want to shop around). Bring us the audience, goals, subject matter, and constraints, and we can help design the experience. 

But what does that actually look like?

To answer that, let’s take a look at a case study of an organization we’ve worked with several times: Mill City Museum.

Background

Mill City Museum is a historical site on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN, built on the ruins of what was once the world’s largest flour mill. Over the years, Danger Boat Productions has partnered with Mill City Museum and other organizations along the riverfront to help people really engage with history, not just sit through another lecture about the industries of old.

While we at Danger Boat are not history experts (well, Brandon actually majored in history, but that’s beside the point), we know how to put together an engaging event. Together, we’ve worked with Mill City Museum to develop comedy shows about political corruption, affordable housing, Mississippi River ecology and LGBTQ+ history. We’ve performed inside historic buildings and outdoors along the river. We even developed an interactive walking tour where visitors had to decide which stories about Minneapolis were true and which were codswallop.

Building the the event around the goals, not the other way around

How did we land on outdoor comedy shows and tours about tall tales? The answer is actually simple: we talked with our client about their goals, and used those to guide our programming.

In 2019, Wini Froelich was a program manager at Mill City Museum. Her task? Work with a coalition of other riverfront organizations to create programming that would connect the history of the riverfront to issues shaping Minneapolis in the present. And, importantly, make it interesting enough that people will actually show up.

Wini had been to a few performances of The Theater of Public Policy before, and she knew that Danger Boat had experience taking complicated—and occasionally sensitive—subjects and making them approachable through interviews, storytelling, and improv comedy.

While Wini knew she wanted to make history feel relevant to modern-day Minneapolitans, and she knew DBP could help her make tough subjects accessible through humor, she still didn’t know exactly how to start building the program. There is so much history around urban-related issues; how could she pick which topics to feature?

Here’s the important part: despite not knowing exactly what she wanted her event to look like, this is when Wini called us. She knew her timeframe, her budget constraints, and her event goals, and trusted that we could work with her to figure out the rest.

After meeting with Wini to get an idea of which questions she wanted to explore with her audience, we quickly developed an idea for the event: a series of interview-based comedy shows at different historic sites along the waterfront. Wini called the series “What Makes Minneapolis, Minneapolis?”

Example #1 - Mississippi River History

Our first event resulted in one of our favorite locations for a site specific performance: on top of the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam.

The topic, appropriately, was the falls, themselves and the geologic history of the area. We thought it would be a good grounding (get it?) for the rest of the program to start by exploring the physical features of the riverfront that has shaped so much of our city’s history. To help us, we invited a former guest of the Theater of Public Policy: John Anfinson, former Superintendent at Mississippi National River and Recreation Area.

In an “onstage” conversation with host Tane Danger, John explained how the falls traveled from the St. Paul area to where they are now in Minneapolis, why the dam was constructed, and why Hubert Humphrey built the lock on the river.

Afterwards, our improvisers did a stellar performance bringing to life the history of the area for an audience in a one-of-a-kind location. It’s hard to beat a theater performance about the falls where you can hear them in the background.

Example #2 - Scandal on the Waterfront

In our planning conversations with Wini, the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Center, and other riverfront organizations, we learned a lot about the history of Minneapolis. Specifically, we learned that the history of Minneapolis along the Mississippi is a history of milling.

The energy of the Mississippi River allowed industries to mill flour at a scale and quality unmatched anywhere in the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Pillsbury A-Mill at one time produced 17,500 barrels of flour a day, but ceased production in 2003. In 2013, the building was given new life and converted into affordable artists’ lofts.

The building is an industrial one filled with conveyor belts, turbines, and centrifuges. It was the heart of the city’s milling industry. Once we learned this information, our team knew right away that this would make an excellent site-specific performance space.

So, we had a location for our second performance, but we still needed a topic.

It was important that this show give a glimpse into the Minneapolis of the milling golden era while still feeling relevant and fun to the audience. And so we thought…who doesn’t love a scandal? 

For a Laughing Matters performance, we invited local authors Penny Peterson, author of "Minneapolis Madams" and Iric Nathanson, author of "Minneapolis in the 20th Century" to help us explore the seedier side of the city’s past. The conversation ranged from the notoriously corrupt administration of Mayor “Doc” Ames to the surprising political influence once wielded by Minneapolis madams of the city’s red-light district.

Then our improvisers turned those stories into comedy.

The result wasn’t simply a history lesson with jokes about brothels and bribery sprinkled on top. The performers used the building, the experts, and the stories together to help the audience think differently about people and systems that shaped the Minneapolis riverfront, and how their legacy shapes the city today.

It doesn’t take much to get Tane to dress up like a carnival barker.

Example #3 - Codswallop: Fact vs. Fiction Tour

Flash forward two years to 2021. Museum program managers everywhere are trying to program outdoor spaces—Mill City Museum included. 

Mill City and the Minnesota Historical Society have plenty of beautiful historic sites along the Mississippi, with several informational tours in their portfolio to learn more about the riverfront. This time, though, they wanted something more interactive and playful to engage visitors in new ways.

Once again, Wini reached out to Danger Boat for guidance.

Here’s a fun Danger Boat fact: back in 2012, we had a residency at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where we developed a tour format called the “Liars Tour.” We already had the structure developed and tested, and we knew we could adapt it to work for Mill City. Since most museums don’t want to be associated with the word “lie,” we chose a softer and more playful name: Codswallop.

The tour format was as follows: two hosts guide a group along a walking route, stopping at different locations along the Mississippi River. At each stop, guests hear two different fantastical stories about the location—but one of the stories is completely made up. The attendees are then asked to debate amongst themselves which story is grounded in fact and which one was pure imagination. 

We told true and tall tales about mill log chutes being repurposed as water rides for tourists, that BF skinners taught pigeons how to guide bombs in General Mills elevators, or that the 10th Ave Bridge was scrapped to help win WW2.

The joke was that people were being asked to spot the lie. The educational trick was that, to do it, they had to pay unusually close attention to the history.

Codswallop demonstrated something the partnership had been teaching us from the beginning: sometimes the best way to help people engage more seriously with information is to give them permission to play with it first.

2021 Laughing Matters show about affordable housing with Mill City Museum.

One client doesn’t mean one kind of event

Over the course of our partnership with Mill City Museum, the subject matter of our events has ranged widely. In the events above, we covered flour milling, municipal corruption, and river ecology. In 2021, we partnered again to design a show about the history of race in affordable housing. In 2024, we created a show all about queer history in Minneapolis. The setting changes, the experts changed, and in the case of Codswallop, even the format changed completely.

Mill City and their partners brought deep historical knowledge, remarkable locations, and questions they wanted the public to explore. Danger Boat brought experience translating complex material into participatory experiences: researching topics, interviewing experts, designing event formats and using improv and humor to invite audiences into the material.

That kind of partnership is useful when an organization knows what it wants its audience to think about, but hasn’t yet figured out what the event should look like.

2024 Laughing Matters show about Minneapolis queer history with Mill City Museum.

What Could We Build Around Your Story?

Our work with Mill City Museum is one of our favorite examples of what “custom” means at Danger Boat Productions.

It doesn’t mean taking the same improv show and changing a few names. It means starting with the people you want to reach, the ideas you want them to wrestle with, and the experience you want to have and then building from there.

The format is flexible because the goal comes first.

If your organization has a completed subject and important story or an audience you’d like to engage in a different way, you don’t need to know exactly what the event should look like before you start planning it.

That’s something we can figure out together. Check out our custom experiences page or reach out to us to start building something truly unique and memorable for your audience.