Utopia, reality and telenovela. These three notions seem radically different. However, for us, they are in fact connected. A utopia can be seen as a fundamental human impulse, a yearning for what has not yet been realized. Just like a Telenovela. Both utopias and telenovelas are imaginative worlds that trigger our imagination and fantasies. They make us want to daydream. It is our imagination that overcomes the gap between our daydreams and our current realities. Our desires and longings are shaped by our imagination. And secondly, maybe both Utopia and Telenovela contain the same ingredients: desire, longing, and pleasure. Ingredients that we can never get enough from – in real life.
Early in the process, we decided that we wanted to use Telenovela as one of our main methods to explore the boundaries of dramaturgical script writing and the use of hyperbolic language. Furthermore, by using Telenovela as a method, we wanted to examine the connection between reality and imagination. We wanted to discover how we could address loaded and topical themes like desire, realism, and escapism through a form that doesn’t necessarily often gets used in the artistic field. Many people see telenovelas as a shallow and cynical format, whereas we think telenovelas could contribute to the reality vs. imagination discussion.
As three group members with three different cultural backgrounds, we took the time to let ourselves be immersed in this specific genre. Nicia, who is originally from Mexico and a soap-opera expert, guided us through the world of Telenovela. While conducting research, we watched a lot of Telenovelas. These stories depict many recurring classical themes that we wanted to include in our Telenovela story, like romance, greed, loyalty, and sin.
We mixed all the ingredients mentioned in the image above together and started writing our own Telenovela story. We used an experimental approach throughout the process, where we created room for dialogue, exaggeration, and playfulness. There are no limitations and restrictions in Telenovela story writing. Everything is possible, which also makes the task of creation challenging. When everything is possible, it’s hard to make anything real. Furthermore, we wanted the story to take place in the future, to enhance the utopian setting. When the story isn’t connected to the present and reality, it even opens up the world of opportunities. Together, we brainstormed about this futuristic setting: how will the characters communicate, how will they dress, and how will they interact with their surroundings. By doing this, we created our mutual disorientation bubble: our creative world with our playful language where we engaged with the story and the universe we wanted to create in both soap opera and VR.
Throughout the process, we worked a lot with improvisation. The telepathic communication shaped meaning by playing with it: we used live-action roleplaying in Obidos to discover what telepathic communication could look and feel like. The outcomes of those improvisations were included in the script. Although we made room for experimentation and improvisation, we still followed the more traditional screenwriting process: from concept idea to treatment, to the script. We discovered that this imposed structure allows more creative freedom. Together with the actors, we also played with the dialogue: we experimented with finding the right balance between the exaggerated soap opera style, without becoming disconnected from the narrative. This improvisational method infuses all the takes, both in dialogue and body language, with a spirit of freedom and collaboration.
An important decision in terms of experimentation was to record the telepathic dialogue after filming the scenes with a 360 camera. This way, we could allow ourselves to rewrite lines and reshape scenes. During the editing, we discovered that we needed a narrator in order to let the participants be transported in the story. Although the narrator’s voice-over was never written in the script, by adopting this experimental and flexible approach, we could easily add this new narrative.
Creating room for exaggeration, hyperbolic language, and telepathic communication, to evoke questions about reality, truth, and the future - as a conceptual framework – is something we would like to expand in further artistic research.
