Theater: "Bluebeard's Dollhouse"

Charles Perrault's murderous fairy tale "Bluebeard" merges with Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" in this haunting, immersive promenade-style theatrical event by Combustible Company. Marriage, violence and the power of secrets converge as this production winds through the unique and intimate spaces of the Hill House. A murder-mystery unfolds using theater, dance, puppetry and live music, taking the audience on a seductive journey through the suffocating marriage of Torvald and Nora, underscored by the brutality of Bluebeard's murderous compulsion.

Well this sounds... disturbing-yet-amazing. Bluebeard's Dollhouse, is a new take on the never-nice Bluebeard tale and sounds quite intriguing. With curiosity as one of the key (heh) themes in the tale, it's surprising we don't see more murder-mystery or procedural framing for retelling this story. And a bonus? They're partnering with the Minnesota Historical Society to give you that extra haunted (doll) house feeling, using three of the available floors of the Hill House Mansion to stage the performances. Sounds like an immersive experience.

Combustible Company seem to have taken this show beyond a simple retelling and are looking at the tale a little deeper, and with an unusual slant. There's an interesting interview you can read HERE with the creators about how they came to this "mash-up", and how they will be using the various rooms, moving the audience around from time to time I'm excerpting some tale pertinent bits below:

Erik: ...it's not as crazy as it may seem. Both stories are captivity tales in their own ways and both contain a measure of violence. In one story it’s physical and in the other it’s emotional. Both contain secrets that threaten to destroy the heroine. Kym: As I was researching the Bluebeard fairy tale, I was struck by the power that marriage had over a young woman’s life – how Bluebeard’s bride was essentially held captive as wife, even as his property – and that the only real agency she had was to explore forbidden knowledge. This reminded me a lot of Nora in Ibsen’s play: she is defined by the institution of marriage, infantilized by her husband, and she harbors a secret that reveals both Torvald’s and her own true natures. Bluebeard, Torvald, and Nora are each “destroyed” by the revelation of their secrets, and yet, especially for Nora, this shattering of the mask is the promise of freedom.
Erik: Setting Bluebeard’s Dollhouse in essentially a 19th-century castle reinforces the intersection of the stories we’re weaving together and creates an atmosphere that’s simultaneously grandiose and intimate. 

What specific types of puppets are you using in this show?Erik: We have a number of dolls, both found and constructed, that will be puppeted by actors themselves, but will also be manipulated either directly or indirectly by other actors.
Kym: We will [also] be animating found objects: suitcases, knives, keys, mannequins, dolls. Everything is alive in this fairytale world. In the Bluebeard story, even the key is alive – it bleeds, telling Bluebeard of his wife’s transgression. (You can read the whole interview HERE.)

Digging for a little more information on the use of the Bluebeard tale, we found this "Support Bluebeard's Dollhouse" page, which explains a little more.

By merging Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Perrault’s Bluebeard we create a new story, a “captivity tale” about the fight for personal emergence and acceptance that many face in our society. The struggle to “become human” and the emotional and physical violence that occurs when our humanity is limited by social constructs resonates most powerfully. In both stories the main characters struggle to be known for all that they are and hope for the redeeming power of love. They seek to escape the confines of society and reveal the “secrets” that contain the fullness of their humanity. In this marriage of stories both Nora and Torvald/Bluebeard act upon each other as catalysts for change, embodying our own need to confront terrifying truths locked away within ourselves and venture beyond the stultifying comfort of the Dollhouse into dynamic and transformative interaction with our world. They must transcend old notions of love and the rituals that anchor the status quo in their lives and risk moving into new definitions of themselves.

Perhaps the most informative of all, is this video, in which the creators explain their concept and "set the stage", literally:

This sounds like it's going to either be an amazing and unforgettable experience, or be so continuously bizarre for the audience the experience will head quickly into sensory overload. It makes us wish we had the choice to go.

It sounds perfect for some fairy tale themed Halloween entertainment!

Bluebeard's Dollhouse premieres on Friday September 30th 2016, with additional performances on October 1st, October 6th-8th and October 14 & 15. Each performance day has two times to choose from.

Gaming: "The Little Mermaid" Meets A.I. in Upcoming Game "The Lost Pisces"

I'll be the first to admit this territory of advanced gaming is something I'm not very familiar with. I'm learning along with my kid (who's already much better than I am) and rarely play adult games so when it comes to what people are into, excited about and how this upcoming video game is so different, it takes me a couple of read-throughs to get it - why it's so "epic" and why people are looking forward to it, but once I got there, I knew I had to try and break it down, to bring you in on what's happening here (and with a fairy tale we know well) - because it's pretty.. well.. "epic".

Unlike you might expect, the new game "The Lost Pisces" does more than reference a fairy tale. It bases it's entire premise on Hans Christian Andersen's melancholy The Little Mermaid and then takes it a step further. I'll let them explain.

From OverclockersClub:

The Lost Pisces, or rather just PISCES, is "an experiment in connecting a gamer with an artificial intelligence," according to an interview with designer and artist Dan Rutkowski, just in a way that's different from past instances. PISCES draws its inspirations from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," where the mermaid is taken away and replaced with a machine that is simply terrified of disappearing. Rutkowski says this machine, the woman seen in the screenshots, is in search for a soul, much like in the original version of "The Little Mermaid," and wants to find that her life will go on after death. 

Sirenum (Edit: the Indie company creating the game) wants players to feel emotionally connected with the protagonist, especially since she learns from the players actions and becomes unique to each player. The team wants to create believable AI in PISCES, one that starts off as a blank slate, but learns and adapts from the player. The AI takes what we do and changes based on that, and if you happen to use a Kinect while playing, the faces you make while playing will reflect on the character. Playing with a Kinect isn't required, but perhaps recommended to get an even better connection with the AI.

Interesting, right? I've never seen The Little Mermaid paralleled so obviously with Artificial Intelligence before, but I can see how they got there. In a high powered digital world where you don't even know if the people you're friends with on the internet, whom you've never met in person, are truly who they say they are - or, to take it a step further, are even real - loss of identity, the feeling of aloneness while surrounded by millions and the feeling of anonymity that can happen though you are in full public view on the internet, can make people feel lost... And not real.

The game takes this idea that is, unfortunately, very prevalent among social media users on platforms that encourage social interactions to be boiled down to "likes" and "dislikes" (that is, Facebook) and gives it another metaphor. Somewhere between a mermaid's hunt for a soul and a little wooden puppet's longing to be real is a story people identify strongly with and for that reason alone, this game has the potential to make some very loyal and intense fans.

In fact, the initial exclusive interview with the creator was titled:
THE LOST PISCES – NEW UE4 ADVENTURE PROMISING AN EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE THAT STICKS WITH YOU LONG AFTER COMPLETION

Creator) Rutkowski says. “This is the Hans Cristian Andersen version, it’s a little bit darker. The idea behind The Little Mermaid, when he wrote it he had a strictly Christian background, and there’s this notion that nothing except for human beings have souls. So in The Little Mermaid, she’s not really after the Prince necessarily, like in the Disney story, what’s she actually looking for is a soul. So I was naturally attracted to that idea, because it was so in line with artificial intelligence. 

He continues: “If you follow the story of The Little Mermaid, she’s looking for a soul because she knows at the end of her days, she’ll die and turn into sea foam. That’s why she goes to the undersea witch, which in this story is actually more of a witchdoctor, rather than having malevolent intentions. So she trades all these things to become human, but the spell has a timeframe and you have to fall in love. But the undertone of trying to attain a soul is a beautiful idea, especially for this coming era of artificial intelligence; this notion of what makes up consciousness and what makes up a soul. It was a natural thing to graft the story of The Little Mermaid into PISCES. The story goes, that PISCES is The Little Mermaid, this machine that’s suddenly found a tiny bit of consciousness and she, no matter what, wants to gain a soul. She becomes terrified that at the end of her days, she might live for 300 years being a machine, but there’s nothing for her to go on to, no possibility of an afterlife.” 

...“One of the things that we’re going to show... is how powerful the PISCES character actually is. She can manifest these black shards that float around her and she can cast them out. Those shards can pull across the ground and create massive boulders that you can use to bash against the larger robots. As she turns more and more human, the thing is that she loses that ability, so she becomes weaker and weaker. What will happen is you will see her as more and more human. She’s evolving beyond just being a machine, and you have to take up the slack, up to the gamer’s character to fulfill that role.”

For the setting:

PISCES takes place in a technological Atlantis, but the end of it when the water levels are rising and people are heading higher up into the mountains.

There are a ton more details in the original interview HERE, that take you through the gaming specifics, what they're trying to achieve and the challenges in doing that, especially since, as the creator says, if they can't get the gamer to care about this character it's a failure. They're employing an unbelievably huge and complex system to make this work - from developing the visuals to be even more beautiful and dynamic, to motion and micro-expression sensors aimed at the players so that the "girl" can learn and develop her "humanity" from the gamer. It's a daunting task but sounds amazing if they can pull it off.

If anyone ever asks you if fairy tales can be relevant today in a fast-paced digital gaming and social media world, just point to this example. It's clear that no matter how society and technology change, people essentially don't - and we still have the same fears, loves and longings we've always had.

The official website for Pisces can be found HERE and to get a better idea of how things will look and play, follow them on Twitter HERE for lots of development and art updates.