Inspired by Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Tori Iwatani's influential 1980s video game Pac Man, Four Electric Ghosts follows the afterlives of four sisters who separately encounter the same mortal in their journey through the Land of the Dead.
The story is told through dance, narration, and original music.The story begins in the Land of the Living. A wise farmer splits a kola nut into four parts and gives them to her four daughters. She also gives them protective chalk. The daughters plant their protective chalk and each reaps a special gift that they are to use for the good of their community: a powerful axe, a magical quill pen, a miraculous loom, and enchanted bells that can charm any audience. When the sisters later arrive as ghosts in the Land of the Dead, they still carry their gifts. But they decide to venture out and explore the Land of the Dead on their own.
We travel with each sister to a different ghost town, and in each town we learn that the laws, customs, and materials are different from the next. The ghosts find praise, acceptance, love, and fame in the afterlife, but when they forget the true purpose of their gifts, they lose everything they have gained. Each journey is punctuated with songs in the related traditions of funk, rock, and R&B. The story ends with an invitation to join the performers in a final dance.
For this performance, Moonrabbitz and architect Alexandre Delaunay integrated the projection image into the narrative of script, movement of the dancers and dynamic sounds of the live band in a three dimensional way. Alexandre brought a design of a "projection house" where dancers can interactive with the live footage of the projection. The shade of the house was designed to open and close as dancers came in and out of the house. To achieve this, Alexandre and I simulated how to project onto the house shape using virtual cameras in 2D&3D comouter graphic softwares.
photo by Warren Cho
For the each scene of the story, I created a landscape that was projected on the black brickwall of the the stage. Below are designs for electric town, wood cutting contest, fish headed junk ghost town, feather town, weather town and flavor town where each ghost makes a trip.
