Last Friday, our new residents, Amy Rose and May Abdalla, who together form ANAGRAM, gave a lunchtime talk at the Studio. ANAGRAM is a collaboration formed in order to explore new methods of immersive documentary making. Their current project; Door Into the Dark is at its beginning stages, and Amy and May are embarking on a period of research and development at PM Studio in order to make it work. The project will combine visceral stimuli such as darkness and binaural technologies with genuine recordings of people telling their story, in order to submerge people in narratives relating how people have become ‘lost’ in some way.

Amy and May are firm friends, and have both been making documentaries for around 10 years. They believe that in order to allow people to get to the heart of a documentary, a question needs to be thrown into the air, not answered. Both Amy and May have made intense, intimate character documentaries. By spending an extensive amount of time with one individual, they strive to open up something universal. They feel that huge questions can arise from uncovering the complexities of one character. To demonstrate this, Amy showed us a clip of one of her documentaries, Twinset, which exposes the relationship between Jenifer, a quiet, church-going transvestite, and her mother. The quiet conversations between a mother and her child tackled some subjects that could be tricky to breach in another scenario. Amy thinks that the most hard hitting documentaries are those in which someone is confronted with something profound, and watching this confrontation urges us to think about ourselves in a novel way. As an example of May’s work, we heard about a documentary she was making in Egypt; Children of the Revolution, which follows three young Egyptians, and their struggle to come to terms with the uncertainty of Egypt’s future. May’s film included a shot of one character, Gigi, a young Egyptian social activist, on the beach in a Gucci bikini reading Karl Marx. May was cautioned that choosing to present the complexities of Gigi’s character could be ‘confusing’ for her audience. By documenting the facts, May failed to present what people expected; the archetypal activist. This criticism strengthened May’s conviction that exploring these kinds of truths and complexities (rather than simplifying them) is the right way to go about making a documentary.

Amy and May feel that the more intensely we feel a story, the more we endeavour to understand the situations others are in; and so they are looking for ways to ramp up the intensity of their documentaries. They want to make it more possible to feel what a character is feeling, and to feel the breakthrough as a story resolves, because, as May said; ‘the thing that really makes us tick is getting to the heart of a conflict’.

Whilst May was away working on the Give Your Vote campaign, (which enables UK citizens to give their vote to those outside of the UK who are affected by UK policy) Amy was in the woods, taking kids camping and organising interactive games. Amy wanted to make these games as engaging as possible. She saw the sheer joy and excitement created by game with lots of active participation, and so designed games which always had a simple structure to them, allowing room for the kids to make choices and to respond in their own way; to feel as much a part of the proceedings as possible. Allowing for response provides the kind of variety and richness of experience that can’t quite be achieved with passive participants. Amy would wake kids up in the night to go for a journey the night air and unusual surroundings made for an even more exhilarating experience. May and Amy had the idea to combine documentary making with this sort of active participation, to take cinema out of the screen and to create activity in a live space where the body takes the first step into a narrative, and the mind follows.

ANAGRAM developed the concept of Door Into the Dark whilst in residence at Blast Theory. The idea of exploring notions of ‘getting lost’ was largely inspired by a book of prose contemplating this very theme; ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ by Rebecca Solnit. Although the practical plans for the project are at their beginning stages, Amy and May were keen to tell us what it could be like for someone taking part. Here are some ideas for what might awaits you as you enter Door Into the Dark:

You approach the entrance, which will be a humble wooden shed (attached to a larger space), and enter. Amy or May is there to greet you and take your coat. They will give you a special blindfold, open a door into the darkness, let you take the end of a rope, and you will then begin your journey. Headphones playing binaural recordings will be embedded in the blindfold, and voices and sounds will accompany you on your passage through the darkness. The recordings will consist of real narratives, in the form of interviews which Amy and May have conducted with people who have become ‘lost’ in the past. Amy played us a snippet of one of these narratives, Brian, talking about his experience of the onset of mental illness, told very calmly with visceral descriptions of his long walks at night. She told us that another recording they have is of a mountaineer who became lost in the Alps and in his isolation, began slipping into hallucination. The vivid way in which these true stories are told should work with the darkness to enhance the pictures emerging in your mind’s eye as the stories unfold. ANAGRAM want these interweaving stories of disorientation to feed into your own experience, dissolving the partition between storyteller and listener.

The second phase or ‘chapter’ of Door Into the Dark, will be even more about you. ANAGRAM are looking into using geo-locative technologies to help you navigate the space. In order to complete this stage, you have to relinquish control and trust the challenge entirely. Amy and May want to discard any sort of screen from the space, and the fact that there is no light to see means even more that you have to rely on your most basic instincts. The stories being told all resolve in some way, as you move closer to departing the space. You emerge at the other end, in a shed identical to the first, but in a different place. The focus themes of disorientation, resolution and change has arisen from Amy and May’s firm belief that a person cannot change if they don’t allow themselves to get lost.

The realisation of the project will come up against a number of challenges; is the active participation going to distract people from truly engaging with the stories being told (or the other way around)? Will the experience be too frightening for some people? How accessible will the project be? Whilst at the Studio, Amy and May will be working out a way to strike a balance between making people feel disorientated and safe, in order to create a truly intense, immersive documentary experience. We’re excited to see the project develop further.