Your Kontinent — + Conspiracy Now Entries

Foreign Radical is a game so of course competition drives the piece. The heart of it, however, is something far more complex: the collective story of each audience that gathers to play.

Each show is radically different depending on who shows up. They leave the theatre (in this case, shipping containers) knowing each other quite intimately — for people who just met an hour before. They have profiled each other, spied on each other, debated in teams, raced each other to the finish line and shared some empathy or disdain.

Foreign Radical: Are You Game?

Foreign Radical is not a video game, board, or schoolyard sport. It’s a game that happens in a radical theatrical environment where your feet are your joystick and your thoughts and motivations are the buttons to take action. You can be in the driver’s seat of political activism, or take the nearest exit off the infobahn as you consider the repercussions of your public cries for freedom.

Foreign Radical: Designing the Game

If you attended Theatre Conspiracy’s previous documentary-style theatre show, Extraction, you might recall that the audience was asked a similar series of content-related survey questions throughout the performance. This time we’re taking questions into new territory through audience inclusion and significant consequences — Foreign Radical will concurrently operate as both a documentary theatre piece and an immersive game. As audience members, you are no longer observing, you are the players of the game.

Gaming and Theatre

In her research for Foreign Radical, Kathleen read the book This Machine Kills Secrets and came across a party game that cryptographers played while inventing encryption techniques that would soon become industry standard (onion routing, torrents). These radicals were inventing the building blocks of secure communication, file sharing, e-commerce and, of course, whistle-blowing.

In the game, players wrote a secret on a piece of paper, put it in a sealed envelope and then routed the envelopes between individuals who either sought to maintain or expose the secret.

For Foreign Radical, we are adapting the game because it has great potential for theatrical application and audience interactivity:

Ethical theatre / dirty theatre

How much tar sand does it take to make contemporary theatre? If we don’t use too much tar sand can we call it ethical theatre? Or is it just dirty theatre no matter how you slice it?

These are a few questions being considered as Theatre Conspiracy begins creative sessions for Extraction after two years of research and planning. Our cast and team of theatre artists are in residence at The Cultch in Vancouver for the next few weeks to experiment before a work-in-progress presentation at Your Kontinent: Richmond International Film & Media Arts Festival on July 21.

ExtractiontcSpyJuly 6, 2012Alberta oil, Beijing, dirty oil, ethical oil, Extraction, oil sands, tar sands, Vancouver, Vancouver theatre, Your KontinentComment