My performance collective Humble Wonder Theatre created an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure bicycle scavenger hunt for the 2017 Sled Island Music and Arts Festival, through the generous support of Calgary Arts Development's Small Experiments Program grant. The idea was to create a theatrical narrative through a gamified mechanic experienced on a bicycle. In form it turned out as a challenge to bike all over downtown Calgary to explore the sites of Calgary's counter-culture scene in the 1980s, by collecting all 10 pages of a hand-made zine hidden through the city. Each page gave a clue to finding the next one, with some poetry and illustrations from our titual hero Henry to contextualize the location, and why it was important to him.
Humble Wonder had been developing this idea for several years. We'd done a few trials of a more performance-based version based on a completely different set of poetry by Lee Cookson in the summers preceding 2017. However, we found through our experiments that our interests were leaning more towards a game structure, instead of a traditional performance structure. The fact that our audience was active, riding from place to place, strongly suggested to us that they themselves were the protagonist, and needed to be set into a structure where their actions drove the story (or experience) forward. But it's really hard to script something like that! Without looking into video games, tours, urban challenges, etc. anyway.
The goal was always to try the first full version of this idea at Sled Island. The festival is a) an amazing fun time, and b) the most active bike event in downtown. It's a part of the culture of the festival to bike to all the shows, the performances are all scattered around town and one tends to hop from venue to venue. Bikes are perfect for it, and the festival does a great job of engaging safe bike culture: lots of safety initiatives, helmet giveaways, and a ton of temporary bike lockups at most of the venues. Built-in audience for us, artsy folks with bikes, downtown, who may have some time to kill between shows and want to check the non-music programming out.
So we applied for funding to try out a full version, and we got the cash! Enough to cover artist fees, printing costs, and fabrication for the real-world, tangible aspects of the show. We decided on a zine-style structure pretty early, and started development on that. Laurel, Richard and I formed a development pod to work my poems into the base structure for, well, The Ten Page Henry: A Bike Game, which you can read in it's entirety below. The collective produced the piece, figured out logistics, did edits, feedback sessions, real-world testing, fabrication, lots of things to get the project up. I wrote the poetry and did the illustrations and page layout, so my fingerprints are the most noticeable.
We got permits from the city (newspaper permits I think?) and installed these custom newspaper boxes throughout downtown, outside and inside venues. Some spots were just corners beside the train tracks, one was Olympic Plaza, one was Broken City... the whole thing took people about an hour to do, and if they completed it and came back they received a small bound copy of the zine as a prize. (We wanted to make cassette tapes with a mix of Calgary bands from the 80s for a prize, but turned out that was a bit outside our budget). People seemed to like it! "The puzzles were too easy" was a common complaint. I play puzzle games all the time so I get it! We weren't sure of the general skill level of our players, or 100% sure if our puzzles made sense (we tested them but y'know) so we kept them as solvable as we thought necessary. We had a tip line (my cell phone and our social media DMs) but no one really called it.
I'm proud of the piece, we created a unique experience and I got to express a lot of my misgivings about our current political mindset in Calgary: the legacy of what we build/fund and what we demolish, or let go up in smoke to be replaced by a shiny new building. I was able explore Calgary's counter-culture history and the history of the artist-run centres, dive bars, and scene spots in a foundational period of Calgary's development. Transposing myself into the character of Henry, a punk rock poet kind of bumming around in 1980, I found a lot of interesting ways of thinking about the same things which worry me today. Sometimes the more things change, the more the stay the same.
