Portfolio > from the project HOPPLA! 2007-2015

The Death family, Dada, Mama, and Baby Death, will ultimately find themselves in a destroyed landscape of refuse from an armed and total combustion, a civil war.
But first we find them in a troubled urban landscape beset by riots and police sieges, living in a typically affected highrise. The building has four stories. Flowcharts here describe the tug of war on Baby Death, who nominally identifies with and participates in a progressive youth movement, beyond the walls of the building, whose members keep being kidnapped and murdered by the hodge-podge of international Gendarmes who keep trying to run the streets and extinguish their spirit. Mama and Dada Death, too, have conflicted relations to the political extremism at their doorstep. As the Patriarch and a consummate Ubu figure, Dada Death is allied with the old guard. Battles of will and policy between members of the older generation are the field of his struggles, as well as the intergenerational set-to with Baby Death, the contemporary peace-punk.

When the bombs have all gone off and the city is leveled, when the Death family has fled the violence to a scarred and burnt rural hillside, Dada Death will be at mortal odds with his own brother. At that point, the play begins, DADA DEATH, as scripted for three actors playing six characters, the family and three government officials.
At the end of the play, a Chorus plays The Movement and sings an uplifting anthem to Freedom.

For a while, I had a plan to make a deconstructive live action documentary based on some of these ideas. It was to include rehearsals of the never-to-be-performed play and animated sequences. There were to be gaming spin-offs! Well, I'm not likely to do all that just now. But on this site are prequel animations to the stage play, in the same folder here, and you can read the play, too. I've left jpegs in place that chart some of the gaming themes (mazes with conflicts, etc).

---10/19/13