The tongue-in-cheek anthology, Abdication!, a multi-cultural, multi-media dark comedy more than reminiscent of Black Mirror, The Handmaid’s Tale, and VR, will be a featured event for the 10th anniversary THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY DREAM UP FESTIVAL 2019. Performances will be at the Johnson Theater Space at 155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), New York City on 09/03: Tuesday, 9pm; 09/04: Wednesday, 6:30pm; 09/05: Thursday, 9pm; 09/06: Friday, 6:30pm; and 09/07: Saturday, 8pm. https://abdication.brownpapertickets.com/
The Night Gallery of three tales are
STUCK: a close-knit Italian-American family grapples with the idea that one of its family members plans to remove from society by hooking up full-time to a virtual reality network.
LOVE LOBOTOMY relates the story of two hapless souls deciding to undergo Amigdalar Resurfacing, (a “Love Lobotomy”) making them immune to romantic feelings and more productive… maybe.
And finally, COLOR SCHEME takes us to a society where everyone has been classified into a specific color-red, green, blue, etc., and the implementation of this system has ostensibly led to perfect harmony. Until someone mixes and matches.
Filled with gallows-humor, song, dance, and multi-media, each episode shows how abdication of a portion of human existence pulls a piece out of the house of cards that we call our lives.
Appearing in this triumvirate of techno-tales is Amanda Cannon, Trenton Clark, Alan Cordoba, Janet Donofrio, Naya James, Stephen Keyes, Cesar Lozada, Mike Ivers, Sid Ross, Meredith Rust, Tony Scheer, and Topher Wallace.
Why is this PLAY on a FILM site? Because ABDICATION is filled with INNOVATION. There are film sequences and it has its own animation director.
Raylla Chan, an animator and illustrator who uses her work to tell stories has always sought inspiriation from the latest and most powerful mediums of comics and video games. She takes the “theatrical” approach and focuses her expertise on character animation, storyboarding and character design.
“My creative process can differ from time to time, but it usually starts with an idea where I will quickly scribble out sketches and jot notes so that I can remember it, capture the feeling of the idea and expand it from there,” hence her comic book roots. Her approach goes fro comic to character and she sets-forth as any actor might: ” [I] make the fantasy elements in a story or piece of art feel real [by] focusing on the character or emotion I’m trying to portray. This way no matter how far the work detaches from reality, people will be able to relate to it,” Chan smartly said.
Abdication is a dark comedy. We asked Ms. Chan how does she accomplishs that with animation:
“This one is hard because it kind of depends on what you’re trying to make. If it’s a long episodic story you can still inject humor into a story with serious themes as long as the jokes are timed correctly and don’t stray too far from the overall tone of the story. I would say injecting humour sometimes is necessary for certain kinds of stories with serious themes to alleviate the heavy bits and give the audience a break. If it’s something that of a short film or comic I will usually have a message and use comedy to illustrate and emphasize that message.”
inDfilm 