Good day, My name is Ringo Wilson. I’m a senior pursuing a Bachelor of Special Studies in Methods of Storytelling, with a concentration in Creative Writing. In the second block of my senior year, I was given the opportunity to visit New York City with the theatre department to watch and analyze a variety of shows and experiences. It was an opportunity to broaden my horizons and see more stories told in unique ways.
I can’t stop thinking about the most unique of these shows. While as a group we agreed it didn’t count as a play, it most certainly is the thing that I think is the most similar to ‘literature’ in the literal sense. I came away with the understanding of it as an “auditory interactive experience”. I call it that because during the experience there’s an audio track, which narrates a story as you go through sensory adventure, guided by light and darkness through the tale. The way that the story was written and
presented is really interesting to me, as I’ve never done anything like it. The closest experience I can compare it to is an escape room, but this story was much more linear and theatrical than those tend to be. I wasn’t an influence on the narrative at all, just living through it.
The experience is inspired by a short horror story called The Moon Slave, and having read it now in response to the event, I’m very impressed with how successfully it managed to capture the eerie atmosphere. The story is about a young woman, Princess Viola, who is enamored with dance–and seduced in the light of the full moon by the Greek god Pan. She finds herself in the center of a long abandoned hedge maze on the night of her engagement, and begs the moon for music, unaware that it isn’t the only one listening to her. Nonetheless, there is music, and she dances till dawn by the light of the full moon. She is called to the clearing many times and on the night before her wedding is finally
stolen away, the only clue to what had taken her is a pair of foot prints–one her own, the other cloven. It’s a really interesting little story, only about 2000 words, I think. But it is strongly atmospheric and the event was a very unique way to experience it.
The experience itself, as I currently understand it, follows a young girl through the stages of childhood, adolescence, and the cusp of adulthood. The story is winding and whimsical, taking the audience through the Real and Unreal in physical space. The Unreal is a dreamlike world, more abstract and representational than literal, where we hear the story of Princess Viola, who is a clear parallel to the “real” Viola who shares her name. It evokes some ideas from other stories of a similar nature.
When I took Katie Sagal’s Gothic Monsters class, I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of classical and modern gothic story telling. I find that this experience (while not containing a “monster” in the
traditional sense) was very much reminiscent of that Gothic inspiration. I have a predilection for gothic literature–I’ve always enjoyed it, and I found that this event did a phenomenal job of bringing me into that headspace. I think I’d really enjoy being a part of crafting something like it. And having experienced it as a member of its audience, I’m inundated with ideas of how I can take the storytelling and design philosophy forward with me into future creative endeavors.
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