March 30--You might think an effort that goes before the public daily as the "Aquatic Show" would be a pretty low-key affair.
Don't let the lack of a fancy title fool you. Just because it's not "Undersea Wonder" or "Cetaceans on Parade" doesn't mean Shedd Aquarium's daily, big-pool demonstration of animal behavior and institutional philosophy, sometimes including big dolphin jumps, just flops into place.
The new "Aquatic Show" is finally facing the public now, at the end of March, after its first complete overhaul since the lakeside Abbott Oceanarium opened in 1991. It's in previews and officially opens Monday. (The other show currently running, "One World," was introduced this decade.)
Now the trainers, animal care professionals, do as much talking in the show as the narrators, who tend to come more from the city's acting ranks. Now the voices are supposed to sound more natural and conversational, less determinedly perky and presentational. Now the videos between animal segments have been updated to reflect current conservation and rescue efforts and upgraded to incorporate contemporary video technique.
"It's incredibly different," said Andy Park, sitting in the oceanarium's amphitheater after guiding a February rehearsal, an early one in the monthslong show creation process. "This show does a much better job at framing what our priorities are, especially animal care, our rescue and rehabilitation initiatives, our emphasis on conservation. The old show was just about training. It really got down into the weeds about training. This show is a little bit broader."
Park's title at the Shedd, perennially one of the city's leading tourist attractions, is artistic director, another thing that makes you think there's more going on with the "Aquatic Show" than might be immediately apparent to an average visitor. Although he steers all of it -- the music, the lighting, the script, the direction -- he is especially excited about getting the trainers talking.
"We have over 40 trainers that are going to have to learn the narration for this, and many of them, they're not comfortable on mic. This is a big step for them," Park said. "But it's different to have a trainer talking. They don't come off superpolished, maybe, but they come off in the right way. They know these animals so well. They can share information we've never been able to share before because they know it."
In a practice show, Ken Ramirez, the Shedd's longtime head of training who is now a consultant, wore a wireless mic while out on one of the habitat's islands, communicating to the crowd through the microphone while using his training whistle to put the animals through their paces.
"Can you tell us a little bit more about the Pacific white-sided dolphin," asked the narrator, referring to the open-ocean species that the Shedd keeps, in keeping with the oceanarium's northwest theme.
"They have some pretty impressive natural behaviors," Ramirez said, "like somersaults, corkscrews, towering leaps."
And then he delivered his mantra of positive-behavior reinforcement training, one that people who have tried, haltingly, to train their dogs might find amazing.
"They will go their entire lives without ever being told they're bad or hearing the word no," Ramirez said. When an animals fails to produce the requested or trained behavior, the trainer simply ignores it, gives no whistle of reinforcement, no fish, and then moves on to another behavior the animal will succeed at.
Afterward, Ramirez told the group of assembled trainers to not be afraid of getting across the script's ideas in their own words, but just be sure they hit the cues for music. "It's really important that it comes out of your mouth naturally," he said.
Putting the new show together came about because of a sort of collective feeling that it was time, staffers said. Elements of the "Aquatic Show" had been updated in 2009, including the introduction of more video.
But still, "it was basically designed to let an audience see training in action, but the audience definitely wasn't first priority," Park said.
So about a year ago, the show team started meeting, brainstorming ideas, said Tynnetta Qaiyim, vice president of planning and design. "There's always a struggle between entertainment and education," she said. "For us it's about finding that right balance."
Although it isn't explicitly spoken, also essential, in an era of SeaWorld responding to public pressure by pledging to change the way it cares for and displays orcas, or killer whales, is that the show effectively and forcefully communicate the aquarium's role in animal management.
By February, the concept and scripts had been approved and work was well underway on music and lighting. A rigorous, seven-week rehearsal schedule was distributed; it included not only multiple sessions with all of the trainers and narrators who would need to learn the new show, mostly behind closed curtains, but also late-night tech sessions to work out sound and lighting when no guests were in the aquarium.
The stars, of course, remain the animals, but the show is purposely designed so that one "Aquatic Show" crowd might see a different set of animals than the next -- and have no idea of it.
"We put the show together to have maximum flexibility," Ramirez said.
The new show is designed to have three animal segments, cetaceans, noncetaceans, cetaceans, interwoven with videos that talk about how staffers found their paths to working with animals and some of the institution's scientific efforts and rescue work.
In Park's terms, that sounded like this, as he explained to trainers the rehearsal they were about to see: "This is beluga-penguins-dolphins. This very well could be beluga-penguins-beluga. Or it could be beluga-dogs-dolphins.
"Make it feel like this is the same show everyone sees every day, even though we know there are about 30 different options."
The flexibility gives trainers the ability to work around a pregnant animal, say, or one that hasn't been responding well lately.
During rehearsals, Park said, back in early February, failure not only was an option, but it also was one he hoped for.
"Hopefully in the next couple of months, everything that can go wrong will," he said. "We want things to go terribly, terribly wrong so that we can figure out what we have to do to fix it before we have thousands of people watching us."
sajohnson@tribpub.com
