Innsmouth

The Épica Foundation carries out this project in collaboration with the Danish school Århus Produktionsskole, specialized in the social and labor integration of young people at risk of exclusion.
The management of Århus Produktionsskole together with 16 students from its Kulturentreprenør program, visited the Epic Foundation to carry out the workshop entitled Innsmouth and inspired by the work La sombra sobre Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft.
The objective of this project is to use the literary work as inspiration to carry out a common work, leaving aside the literal adaptation.
Elements such as the sensation of constant danger, the different versions of the same story, sacrificial rituals and beings from the depths of the sea will serve as a base from which to develop scenes. Since the duration of the workshop is short, the students received and read the story in advance, thus making it easier for the whole group to share an imagery on which to base their performance from the first brainstormings.

The first week must establish solid foundations at the level of group cohesion, approach to ideas and their execution. Given that the students will have to present their performances in a few days, it is essential that the team disinhibits and begins to strengthen the bonds between its members. In addition, from the second day they are divided into working groups, they are assigned a fragment of the story and they are asked to develop ideas to put it on stage. The fragments in question are:
1. The protagonist’s journey to reachInnsmouth.
2. Discovery of the town.
3. Strange, disturbing, mysterious elements.
4. Zadok Allen, town drunk, narrator’s informant.
5. Stories of sacrifices and rituals.
6. Metamorphosis.
Once the first objectives have been set, the students get going: transforming ideas into actions. Scenes involving shadow-beings, humans transforming into fish and games with mirrors that distort the image of the public will be the first bases of the performance.

Throughout the second week, the Innsmouth students put all their efforts into the final preparations for their performance. During the first days, the last brainstormings are held to finish polishing its structure: some characters are dismissed, such as the town drunk, who should have served to guide the public through the different spaces, while others such as the shadow-beings and the priestess responsible for the sacrifices gain more strength and replace their role. Some scenes, such as the metamorphosis, go from being a key point in the synopsis to an idea present throughout the show: transformations, symbolic and literal, will be a recurring theme throughout the performance (projections where a fish is thrown into the sea and turned into a human being, offerings of dead fish in exchange for human lives, those same human lives hung up like fish to be sacrificed…). Once the script for the show is clear, the rest of the days are used for technical screenings and general rehearsals. The premiere is very close.