On the other side of the rift

Altair – Target Audience

I’m still working out the consequences of my discovery about character movement in relation to the viewer/player.

It’s as if I’ve seen the start of the rift that will drive a definitive wedge.

All this probably seems very secondary to you – in fact, it is very secondary.
It is important to me because it explains all my intuitions.

The widening gap separates the audience of the shows into two pieces – those who stay in the side: world before, and those who arrived or were born on the side: world after.
The people in my theatre, in France, are on the old side. Their public too.

The people who will come to Altair are on the other side of the rift.
I realized that they were born with this familiarity, this astonishing closeness to their characters.
Those on the older side, by and large, don’t have that familiarity.

The old side, far from the character, respects: the artists, the texts, the great elders, the instructions.
Everyone has his place and the spectators’ place is several meters away.

The new side, dug by the fault, respects perhaps, but does not idolize: they are the characters in the games.
When it comes to movies or manga, they pick up the stories of the characters: they’ll create Mods – I was talking about this last year – that allow them to bring into their favorite games what they want to bring in – and if they need to bring JoJo into Skyrim, they’ll bring JoJo in – they did.
They’re going to invent extended universes – in plain English, they’re going to write stories associated with the core story.
They will create images – fan art
Videos
They’ll edit the game movies.
In short: they are in the spirit of appropriating what they liked.
There is no question of staying away.

Even though you can tell me that movies and comics leave them out – look at what’s happening: characters are being taken over. They are “theirs”.

Seen by others, who have stayed on the classic side of the divide, it’s a pure scandal.
It is iconoclastic.
And the respect?
And the right to the image?
What about copyrights?
And the authors, the artists ???? did you think about them, madam, before jumping on the side of the vandals?

Perfectly I thought about them.
I will put flowers on their headstones.

The old side is unfortunately finished – it is fading away.
It is the other side that is the present and will be the future.
I find this appropriation of the works quite amazing.

Altair will have to be clear about its position: Altair is on the other side of the rift.

This means very clearly that Altair is made to be appropriated – hijacked – used

Altair and the artists who will come there.
There is no need to come with demands from another time – another place.

Meanwhile, in France, in my theatre, those on the old side of the rift still wonder why young people don’t come, when there are such attractive prices.

Probably because they are not allowed to play – to appropriate – to photograph – to film – to divert – to build other ideas.
So much for the old side of the rift.

What satisfies me about this tiny discovery I made is that I am sure of my intuitions now.

I have built Altair – in my mind – for a young audience, the audience I know and who I have known for a long time plays and appropriates their favorite stories. I’ve told you about them before, about their ways of making stories their own, their desires to make them their own.

As long as I didn’t know why they were so different from their elders, I could still think they would change.
That it was simply an effect of age and new technologies.
So it was possible to question the relevance of a theater designed for an audience that would return to “normal.

Now I know they won’t change – they can’t – they were born after this little revolution in the world of stories.
They were literally born on the other side of the rift.

And what’s really great is that they’re getting back to the original relationship that existed between people and stories: they were free, common to everyone, everyone put their own little touch to it, no author, no absolute reverence, no a very, very great freedom of creativity spread everywhere and is spreading everywhere again.
That’s chic.

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