The Higher Ground Drive-In Experience

With quarantine and COVID still dominating people’s minds and livelihoods, the list of events and businesses changing or being affected by this sudden social-distancing shift seems to grow by the day: High school graduations, movie theaters, restaurants, bowling alleys. To the vast majority of us these services will be significantly limited, if not a completely different experience to what they were mere months ago. And with each service or event needing transformation for these new times, the solutions people have come up with to keep them afloat are nothing short of ingenious.

Starting June 13th, in Essex Junction, VT, Higher Ground proudly hosted the “Drive-In Experience,” their solution to keeping stage-set events with crowds around in a time where a traditional audience just cannot be had. The incredibly simple but effective pitch is the same as a drive-in movie theatre, but applied across the board to events like concerts, graduations, films, anything and everything that was once done in front of rows of seated people, now done before rows of parked vehicles.

This is hardly the first drive-in response to social distancing protocols. In early April of 2020 events that would eventually inspire this one began to appear in Europe. They were mostly concerts, played to crowds of entirely parked cars in open areas, and are the closest thing possible to a normal in-person concert currently. This sparked the idea of using the Drive-In format for more and more performance based arts. And now here we are, months later with months worth of improvements and changes. Namely: a “massive” video screen for a greater variety of shows that can be put on, and the ability to get out of your car, something only recently viable thanks to loosened social distancing restrictions.

To get a better idea of the logistics and finer details behind this drive-in I spoke with Alex Crothers, the owner of Higher Ground and one of the minds behind the quarantine drive-in theatre. He said that the venue is: “about 250 cars, four people per car, so it can be up to a thousand people that can actually get together to see a performance.” Throughout our talk, Alex consistently referred back to the Vermont Arts Council and the part it, too, is playing. He told me that: “the whole thing is a benefit fundraiser for the Vermont Arts Council. There’s where we’re donating all the money from the drive-in.” The reasoning behind this is that the Vermont Arts Council offers grants to Vermont artists to help pay for rent, groceries and the like. And in a time where most if not all performing artists cannot work, these grants offer aid to people who need it. It’s been months since these artists have been able to work, and in all likelihood it will be months until they can work again (at least in their field of passion). This is a cause that Alex Crothers, and Higher Ground at large, care deeply about and are working towards supporting via the means of the Drive-In Experience.

So with the question of “why” this event is happening, the next step to exploring it is “how.” As I was told, it came about as a solution to a problem. In Alex’s words: “that problem was high school graduations. The Champlain Valley Expo got a call from a couple of the local high schools through the Champlain Valley school district, trying to figure out a way to host some type of graduation for the graduating seniors in the area. So we all put our heads together and developed this concept as a way to help them, and in the process of doing that we also realized ‘well maybe there’s an opportunity to try and do some other things with this kind of drive-in model.’”

Regarding the actual outcome and longevity of the Drive-In, Alex said: “we hope that it gives a place for people to come together with others in a safe environment, and really to support the arts and the coming together of all sorts of arts and passions. We build it around the idea of supporting the arts, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for other things, like activism or civic organizations. It’s there as an open venue for folks to use in terms of the different ways they see fit, but I think at its core it’s about bringing people together in probably the only way they’re gonna be able to mass gather for a long time. And I think that’s a really fundamental component of the human condition. We want to be together with others, at their core people need other people. So this is at least a way to present music and art on a platform where some small group of people can get together and fulfill that need.”

The Drive-In Experience is open to anyone and everyone looking to take part. All vehicles are allowed, everything from an SUV to a bicycle, with the exceptions to the rule being RVs, campers, buses, trailers, and others of the like. Higher Ground would also like to extend a sincere thank you to the organizations responsible for supporting and contributing to this event and its success, those being: Champlain Valley Exposition, Vermont Community Foundation, Burton, Ben & Jerrys, AARP, Cynosure, Northfield Savings Bank, New England Federal Credit Union, Lake Champlain Ferries, Ferry Dock Marina, Solidarity of Unbridled Labour, Pomerleau Real Estate, and Atomic Pro Audio.

Guest UserJune 26, 2020