Finding our story II

Yep, we have done some web research about death experiences by now. That included viewing and analysing two movies:

• Saw – (2004) by James Wan. A horror movie!
• M – (1931) by Fritz Lang. Crime, thriller.

I also found a performance that goes around this topic:

• Suicide Fashion International - Inspiration for this project was the increasing use of suicide for political purposes and as a weapon and tool within regional conflicts.

And Chris gave us a paper on a performance called Desert Rain, which has the particularity of being acted out as a game for the audience; participants are placed in a collaborative virtual environment and sent on a mission into a virtual world, under the theme of Gulf War.

But… what about our story? Still a lot of work on this subject has to be done, we are now aiming to split tasks; so far I’ve joined the Story, Interactivity and Staging teams. Other teams created: Sound, Dramaturgy, Visuals.

NDE – near death experiences

Well, now we going freaky! I guess the Carnival theme didn't convince us enough after all.

While discussing more deeply the theme issue, everybody presented their own vision of what kind of story we should have. But when the time came to make a choice, instead of presenting different proposals something made us converge on one thing: yes, we all agreed to make some narrative around death experiences: so we are aiming now to tell a story about what is going through the mind of somebody at the moment of death. Memories, mystery: who dies, why dies.

So we were sent off to do research on Near Death Experiences for the next couple of days…

Inspirational real character

We started this week by presenting a real character’s life story that could be used as an inspiration for our project.

My choice was Niccolò Machiavelli. On his most well known work “The Prince” he wrote about the ways powerful man had gained and preserved power. He did not consider morality at all when we wrote it; he had a very un-emotional point of view about it, separating politics from ethics. And I liked also the less know fact about his private life – when living at San Casciano he used to dress up in his most elegant clothes in the evenings just to go to his library and read famous works from the past; he imagined himself talking to the writers, and from the knowledge he received from these meetings he gathered the material to write “The Prince”.

Other students presented:

• “A Man” – life story of someone who because of not being able to build strong family ties with his own children, in the end of his life is suffering from loneliness.
• Madame (Helena) Blavatsky – related to the Theosophical society and spiritism.
• H.P. Lovecraft – author of supernatural fiction.
• Joan of Arc - heroine of France, her visions from God helped her to guide the French army to defeat the English.
• Jussi – a man appears to be suffering from amnesia. How to know if his stories are truthful? His twin brother helps to fill in the gaps.
• "The Turk" - a chess playing machine, an early robot, with a figure of a Turk on it which toured Europe defeating most opponents. In the end it was said there was a real person in the box.