A City of Foxes

A City of Foxes is a tender and intimate approach to immersive storytelling through VR - that allows the audience to have an interactive encounter with a philosophical fox that questions what companionship means in times of otherness and loss. A multi-user multi-phased AI-powered interactive VR experience for one to three participants.

Pitch

Synopsis

A fantastical desert land in India ravaged by civil war.
This land has been ruled by the Royal Hunting Party - that has systematically been eradicating foxes for centuries. In this world, foxes are celestial beings that, when injured, explode into stardust. You are a ‘flutterer’ - like many others around you. Your job is to gather the stardust and bring it back to the Royal Palace. 
In the desert, a pack of hungry foxes lunge for your jugular. You raise an alarm. Armed guards explode foxes. You gather the stardust and return. Back at the palace - you pour the stardust into a large pond and it turns into a dozen goldfish. You realise that you are in the midst of a celebration. The Royal Hunting Party is rejoicing the killing of the foxes.
A baby fox hangs like a pinata from the ceiling. Beneath it, stand three little boys blindfolded with sticks in hand. The sticks make contact. The fox explodes. Stardust falls to the floor. You and the other flutterers begin to gather the stardust. You chase one as it bounces out into the Royal back gardens. 
The stardust bounces onto a tree and turns into a thousand fireflies. A leaf falls. Your gaze follows the leaf down. You find that before you stand - what appears to be the only surviving fox. He is injured. He is dressed as a young boy. In his last moments, he asks if you’d take a walk with him. On this walk, through the answering and asking of questions - you converse about childhood, companionship and loss.
What does it mean to lose someone? 
Have you ever made anyone feel alone? 
As you share your stories with him, he will give you an insight into what belonging and foxhood mean in this land. What it means to be the only surviving fox in a place that was once filled with them. What it feels like to be misunderstood, to experience loss. He will make space for you to share instances when you have perhaps experienced the same with him. 
He wants to show you his home. The garden rises into the clouds and you begin to fly across the palace and over the desert. In the desert, you witness the unequal war. The Royal Army at one end, bombing the city of foxes in the distance. 
The fox takes you into his broken city and inside his broken home. He asks if you would tuck him into bed one last time.
Would you tell him a bedtime story? 
Could you sing him a song? 
A wound in his chest is leaking light and stardust. You lie down beside him as you stare through the absent ceiling and above into the night sky. Above you, artillery fire explodes like shooting stars. The stardust from the fox rises up and merges with the sky. All is silent.

Director statement

As someone of a part-tribal Indian ancestry, I’ve always appeared foreign in every land, including my own. As someone who's attempted to build a home in two continents that are not my own, I’ve grown acutely aware of borders and lines in the sand.

I’ve often wondered about the ways in which my compliance of rules as a way of ensuring my own safety, has allowed me to be complicit in a world in which the loudest voices reign. But it is these very ruminations that have led me to understand the power of silence and listening - as a form of resistance in a world that values the din of divisive rhetoric.

I’ve wondered then as an artist and a storyteller, how I could open up this shared space for contemplation and conversing with others.

In 2015, this lead me to create a six-hour-long immersive performance for one audience member at a time. Drawing upon a series of 36 questions developed by sociologist Arthur Aron to accelerate intimacy between strangers, we created a piece where the audience moved through six rooms and in each - through the asking and answering of questions - they engaged with performers from different backgrounds in deeply personal ways.

The questions were simple.

What is your most treasured memory?
If there is one thing that you could change about the way you were raised, what would it be?
What is your most terrible memory?

While the experience was immense, we often felt - on both sides - the veneer of our social personas getting in the way. Our need to preserve our social realities was preventing us from accessing a deeper truth. I wondered then if the construct of fictional storytelling merged with the medium of immersive theatre and interactive virtual reality - that allowed you to embody another character like a mask - could allow us to transcend those borders and really allow ourselves to be seen.

A City of Foxes is a piece that has emerged from these myriad interdisciplinary positions of questioning. It weaves the ancient, magical form of allegorical fairy tales with the futuristic and complete-immersion capabilities of VR to create a maker space for you to share a moment of deep intimacy with a seemingly vilified other, in a way that might not be possible in the everyday.

Drawing upon our research from Arthur Aron’s '36 Questions', it seeks to create a raw, emotional, fantastical encounter that places the audience and their engagement at the centre of the immersive storytelling experience.

Through a fantastical story world that draws you into its magical universe, A City of Foxes seeks to allow us to sit with the things that make us uncomfortable and are often hard to talk about. Our aim with this is to create a visceral encounter with an oppressed other that allows us to celebrate - not all the ways in which we are different - but that one way in which we are exactly the same.

Director biography

Nihaarika Negi is an Indian interdisciplinary artist working internationally, whose work begins at the site of the body and takes flight through the mediums of performance, writing, directing and producing.
She’s trained as writer/director/performer under master practitioner, Phillip Zarrilli, in the Psychophysical Acting methodology that uses principles of East-Asian meditative martial arts practices to create self-directed performance, train actors and create ensembles. Nihaarika merges this methodology with her work in contemporary performance/ live art and narrative storytelling to create theatre shows, participatory workshops, immersive performances, films and VR projects - that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, and place the notions of intimacy and vulnerability at the centre of the experience. Through her work, she seeks to open up spaces that allow marginalised voices and people of colour to embrace their own cracks and reclaim their lost power. Her work in film and theatre has been described as ‘revelatory and thoroughly riveting’ (Laurence Kardish, MoMA) and work ‘that stands at the cusp of what could be an artistic breakthrough for Indian theatre’ (The Hindu). 
Her interdisciplinary work has been awarded the prestigious XR Market Award at the New Images XR Festival (Paris) and been supported by The Sundance Institute + Women In Film (US), The Venice Film Festival Development Labs (Italy), UK Arts Council, French Ministry of Culture - CNC, SPILL Festival, Roundhouse Theatre, Battersea Arts Center, Camden People’s Theatre (UK), Prithvi Theatre, Serendipity Arts Festival and NFDC Film Labs (India). Nihaarika holds an MA in Physical Performance and Actor- Training from the University of Exeter (UK) and an MFA from the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC (LA). In LA, she has worked in Development with companies like MACRO Ventures, Amblin Partners, Bona Fide Productions, the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and is an HFPA Scholar.

Huidige status

The project has secured funds to make a short version of the experience that can be sent to a festival. This version is expected to be completed by April 2021.

Goals

We are looking for co-production and distribution partners for the multi-phase experience (LBE VR, Social VR and Fixed VR) as well as venue partners (with a focus on community engagement) for exhibiting and touring the LBE VR work.