A Season in Sweet Mode

Organization / Programming.

Since I walked through the forbidden door, and started imagining virtual reality adventures suitable for children, my wonderful child-friendly adventures, with an adult or taken in a group of children – I have accumulated a number of shows.

So it’s time to take stock and see what it would be like, over the full time of a theatre season, my proposals of Sweet Virtuality for kids.

For Journey to the Center of the Earth, we would have an audience from 6 years old.
It would then be a question of discovering, with his mommy ( or daddy, or ou…. with an adult-friend), these extravagant landscapes proposed in this story – made even more extravagant by the work of the Company, which did not hesitate to put us on the stage of the dinosaurs in real size.

As this is a frightening adventure, it would be a matter of proposing a firefly tour, with the possibility of fleeing as far away as possible from the monsters, hiding in a corner of the set and watching it all from a safe distance.
For the more adventurous children – there are always very adventurous children, it will be a question of going to land on the monsters’ mouths for example and try to flee when there is still time . As soon as there is interaction with the big, ugly mouth of the bad guy, the firefly -child will switch off and be reanimated” a few seconds later, – as it is done in all games.

And in order for this to be effective, children – and adults – must really not touch the ground.
I think this is the main concern of Virtual Reality – and it totally breaks the immersion when we do it at home: the real movements of our body contradict what we see and “it” doesn’t fit.

These adventures-actions in a small way, we can propose them on several shows of the season:
Frozen Words – where they’ll find themselves caught in an old galleon, caught in the icebergs of the Sea of Ice – and there we’ll have to add sound, the sound that words make when they defrost…

In The Three Robbers, we can imagine a path that the children must follow to know better than anyone else what is going to happen – and thus be able to warn their heroine of all the dangers.

In the Story of the Magician of Krakow, we could focus on the moment when the magician flies away on his Giant Rooster – as well as the moment when he finds himself carried to the moon and put there, like a useless old shoe: it’s up to the children to help him down – or not, it will be up to them to decide.

In the Story of the Dragon, we could offer them two “places”: one with the mother who must absolutely save her child, the other with the dragon who will get angry, but yes that dragon is bad.

In my great Goat stories, of course – they will be with the goats in danger and could, it would be nice, try to scare the wolf.
But have we ever seen wolves afraid of fireflies?

Here, in short, it would be a matter of going beyond the stage “flying” over the stage – and letting the children interact with scenic elements.

On the other hand, we can propose simple routes: and there, my goodness, anything goes:

To be on the shoulders of the Mishka bear who goes on an adventure in the icy forests of Russia.
Being the fox of the Little Prince
Wiggling on the tail of the Cat that walked by itself

Being in the pocket of one of the crazy people from the cold of the Slava SnowShow
Finding oneself, frightened, in the cell of the animals waiting for their Trial.
Being in the box – the famous box – of the Threads of Hearts
Accompany Tom’s shadow as she searches for her young master in all the most incredible corners of the world.

And I already have too many shows for one season –

So it’s true – it’s not free.
It first requires a good knowledge of the show to identify “what” to do with it.
Then “make something out of it”, that is to say, don’t just put spectators on a piece of scenery and roll young, it will be fine.

The older the children are, the more they will really want to participate.
Depending on the adventures offered on stage, this desire will be more or less achievable, it’s true.

But Altair’s goal will be to make them as realistic as possible – knowing that the quality of the children’s Virtual Reality participation will only improve over time, thanks to technical improvements – the diagram of the evolution of the video game remains in my mind on this point.

And it will be … great ! & I think I would then have succeeded in my bet: to make this extreme & sweet virtual reality an Extreme burst of Laughter.

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