The Cascadian Institute of Cultural Design Presents MONSTERKILL 5: REMONSTERKILLED
The Cascadian Institute of Cultural Design presents the world premiere of Monsterkill 5: Remonsterkilled (Or, We Were the Empty Set), a play about life and death and life and death in a whack-em-up videogame. Set in a world called Scapescape, Monsterkill 5 follows five virtual avatars as they struggle to overcome both their compulsion to constantly bludgeon each other and the machinations of the game designer who eggs them on. The play is an uncomfortably funny, slapstick treatise on the movement of violence from outer life to inner life and vice-versa. Most of all, it's an absurdist takeoff of the traditional videogame format that sees characters die over and over again only to be reincarnated once more with the singular drive to wreak havoc.
About the theme of the show, writer/director M R Horrigan says "When I was twelve I saw a friend instinctively stomp on another kid in the schoolyard. Afterward he was in denial, unable to believe the reflex his foot had carried out. It seemed that his muscles' impulse had been imprinted on his body from somewhere else. I associated the gesture with Super Mario, where players jump on the heads of adversaries in order to defeat them. To play Super Mario you have to do this over and over again until the action becomes nearly unconscious."
Monsterkill's cast and crew are a wildly creative lot that bring varied and unusual life experiences to the stage. Horrigan has a background in musical composition, having won several SOCAN Foundation Young Composer Awards for electroacoustic music. Abbey St. Brendan (Intercom/Ultramon) is the artistic director of Impossible Things Productions, a theatre company devoted to celebrating geeky subject matter. Charlie Cook (Blue) is a stand-up comedian, Tim Kozody (Hacksassin) has a real-life penchant for elaborate knifework as one of Vancouver's top chefs, and Rebal Magrbhi (Lighting Design, Photo and Video creation) previously worked as a videographer in the student movement that became the Syrian revolution (he currently studies film at UBC).
The Cascadian Institute of Cultural Design is a Vancouver-based performing arts company with the (ever so slightly facetious) mandate of "keeping you safe and engaged through the institutionalization of contemporary art." The Institute sends up the educational rhetoric surrounding today's artworks, targeting its punk-inflected satire at audiences of B-list movies, TV-shows and, of course, videogames. Thinking of staying in and watching Netflix? The Institute has a better itinerary for you.
Artistic Team: Director/Sound-Designer M R Horrigan, Producer Riaan Smit, Lighting Designer/Videographer Rebal Magrbhi, Cast: Charlie Cook as Blue, Abbey St. Brendan as Ultramon/Intercom, Marissa Raylene Burton as SuperDisciple, AJ Birtwistle as Sneakysneaky12, Tim Kozody as Hacksassin and Riaan Smit as Peon.
October 30th to November 3rd 2018 8pm. Havana Theatre, 1212 Commercial Drive. Tickets: $16 online at Havana Vancouver https://www.havanavancouver.com/theatre/.
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