Cult Play

CULT PLAY

The Project

 

A queer couple gets involved in a cult masquerading as a progressive self-help group with radical left ideals. One woman realizes how she and her girlfriend have been brainwashed and tries to convince her girlfriend to leave the group with her. The audience witnesses both her internal processing of memories, media, and the shifting dynamics of her relationship, as she unpacks the journey that brought them there.  

A project in the earliest stage of development, digital tech and platform explorations helped to inform how this story will be told, shared, and revealed—on a website and linked out to other digital platforms, digitally performed, or in person with threads into the digital world, or…?   

Artist

 



  • Scout Rexe is a playwright and dramaturg based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, where she studied under playwrights Judith Thompson and Colleen Murphy.

    She is currently writing a play called O Death, in development with Playwrights Workshop Montreal.

    Recently she worked as dramaturg on Megan Piercey Monafu’s Strata Inc. (Strata Inc. Collective, 2020) which was in residence with the Great Canadian Theatre Company and undercurrents festival in Ottawa, and with Jacob Zimmer and Small Wooden Shoe on Check Your Friends and Are We Not Horses (Summerworks, 2017).

    As a younger person, Rexe made books. She still occasionally edits novels, non-fiction, and poetry.

 


 The Residency

Before the DDI

Since this project was in a very early stage of the development, the scope of exploration for the week was quite broad.  There was a desire to create an interactive performance that leverages the strengths of both digital and cinematic storytelling and that is able to illuminate both the internal reflection of memories of the protagonist as well as showing what is happening in real time.  

The digital tech platform explorations will inform how this story will be told: some ideas include video/digital applications and platforms that can integrate social media, news stories and other sources; platforms that can support live interactive digital performance while integrating multimedia elements; website exploration; data mining/algorithms, digital tech that can provide the feeling of an algorithm; making and editing video; filming videos made with 360 cameras.


During the residency

The main focus of the residency period was experimentation with using digital tools to create a strong narrative as well as trying out rapid prototyping of those tools, to test how things worked in process form. What platforms were appropriate for developing a storyline?  As tools were explored throughout the week, thought was given to what the dramaturgical impact of using one form of digital media over the other was.  Some of the forms and platforms that we explored through the week were: Discord, ohyay, 80’s era text based computer games, Twitch (or other live streaming platforms), and various forms of social media.  What emerged from this exploration was the desire to create a custom website to house an interactive, multimedia experience.  

The types of audience interaction on the website were something that started to get explored throughout the week such as the ability for audience members to leave comments on posts, scroll through photo feeds, or chat with bots.  How does this level of agency affect the overall experience and narrative? Are there plants to make sure that what needs to be triggered actually does get triggered?  There were also conversations around the flow of the experience, are people able to roam around the site freely or are they bound to a linear timeline?  How do you design a digital space where audience members are given a high degree of interactivity and agency but are only able to move in one direction?

Given the complex nature of the piece, thought was given to how it could be prototyped and how that could be done without needing to learn web development.  It was decided based on this that Twine might be a good tool to use for prototyping purposes as it offers a low to no code way of creating an interactive story.  

They also wanted to use a filmic aspect to capture memory, or like the interiority of the protagonist that can be shown with the 360 cameras. There was exploration into how documentaries about cults frame their narratives to bring the audience to certain conclusions or emotional beats and how that could be used effectively in this context as well. 


 

Post Residency

Scout benefited from exposure to the whole world of digital art, digital performance and all of the kinds of tools that could be used. This represented a paradigm shift for artistic the knowledge gap as much more theoretical than practical. The tutorials were helpful to understand what the potential possibilities are for development in the future and to decide which direction to go in for the next steps.

Since there was a fairly large technological knowledge gap coming into the week, it is the hope that moving forward that they will be able to learn more of some of the tools that they were exposed to such as Premiere and Photoshop.  While the eventual goal would be to hire a web developer to build the page, there was a desire to continue investigating methods of rapid prototyping such as Twine. 


Tools Used

  • Miro

  • Twine

  • Discord

  • Premiere Pro


 other Winnipeg projects:

  • A performance for one audience member, a mortal who stumbles into the workshop of Janus, the two-headed goddess of doorways and openings. To scare or lure the mortal away, Janus conjures up humanity’s past primal fears, and future aspirational hopes.



    In Time

  • A mysterious supernatural event causes every single Filipino person in the entire world to one day suddenly vanish. The story chronicles the short and long-term consequences of the disappearance of this crucial globalized workforce. A story told through live, and virtual reality performance.



    Everything Has Disappeared

  • Two strange lovers navigating new challenges and finding connection while adapting to an unfamiliar environment. An experimental and structured improv piece with clown-based style and form.



    Accueil


Accessibility Tools
Français du Canada
English (Canada) Français du Canada
Skip to content