The Unseen Ghost Brigade presents

an Experiment in Theatre of the Unseen

A Project Proposal by Muskrat, Taiga, and Walken

Working Title

Renegade Phantasms or The Shadow Cast Along the Banks of the Mississippi

Themes

• ghosts/transients

• nature/natural forces

• danger/change/unknown vs. stability/permanence/stasis

• death/dreams

• industry/social injustice

Premise

Trying to stabilize a force that has an intrinsic current leads to suffering.

Synopsis

This show is comprised of a band of ghosts who all died in someway on or in the Mississippi River. They had been relegated to the lower dregs of society because they gave outlets to forces that society tends to control, and are therefore representative of ideals manifested inside a controlling society. Within each ghost is a current that drives them and it is this current that society tried to crush. Some characters that we have discussed are two lovers, one who is trying to say goodbye, and one who is trying to bring them both back to life by building a strange machine. Other characters we’ve discussed are gamblers, river rats, prostitutes, businessmen who tried to control the river and died in the process, shanty boat caravans, etc. The audience is traveling down the river (figuratively speaking), experiencing the ghosts as they are experience the river; the audience is traveling down the river whose banks are littered with ghosts. The ghosts tell their stories, have conflict with each other, and comment on the present as well as reveal the past.

Stylistic Influences

• surrealist clown, (movement through the world is the driving force that tells the story)

• absurdism

• circus arts (stilts, acrobatics, juggling, etc.)

• Robert ParkeHarrison (The Architecht’s Brother)

• Faulkner Rock

• old time, social music

Purpose for Telling These Stories

We wish to make connections unbiasedly from the performers to the audience, and within the audience as well, in contrast to the effects of society that control people in stasis, and in a static hierarchy. We seek to connect people through a dialogue that will open a way to find a commonness within them. We aim to do this without being didactic, but by acknowledging that nothing is more important that anything else, and therefore we all need to decide for ourselves (collectively and individually) what is important. We will do this by asking questions, not in an attempt to find any one answer, but to encourage the act of questioning. This being said, let it be known that we are creating this theatre in order to seek a kind of justice for the injustices that have been done, and are continuing to be done.

(a kind of malnurished process of communal experience where we are not bound to the learned imperatives of social health.)