"Phantasmagoria" and the importance of story


“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” said data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher.

I read this quote many years ago when I was spending more time trying to get "likes" for a website than I did writing for it. The media game has changed a lot and I think I only stay out of sheer bloody-mindedness, like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.


What hasn’t changed is the public love of stories. That’s why it’s so hard to walk away. To get to convey incredible information, to be a conduit of the amazing is too rich a pleasure to abandon. Stories connect us and just as importantly, allow us to disconnect, because if reality was that great we’d never have invented, and then hungered, for fiction. 

I’ve been thinking about the importance of story ever since I saw Phantasmagoria VI: The Darkness Returns it on its opening October weekend. Phantasmagoria Orlando is a thoroughly unique theatrical experience: a Victorian/Steampunk theatre troupe, compelled to give their audience stories that call out to be told from a mysterious void. To tell them the performers combine  theatre, dance, puppetry, aeriealism (ala Cirque du Soleil) and more. If you get the VIP Ticket - and you must get the VIP ticket - you get what amounts to bonus tracks, additional post-show performances that combine old world sophistication with old school side show. It’s masterful. (Click to get tickets)

And it’s real. If you have CGI fatigue the effects created by live humans right in front of you will be exactly what you need.

As for the stories themselves. Phantasmagoria mixes horror, poetry and folklore, some fabulously familiar and others exotic surprises. They’re all dark and while they don’t all have a dark end they don’t all have a happy ending either, another refresher in an emoji-happy culture.


No matter what your job is your world has probably changed dramatically in recent years and sometimes we all wonder why we still do it. Seeing Phantasmagoria and that veneration of story was a great reminder for me . As a movie magician once said of our illusions we need them, “like we need the air.”  

You'll want to click their "likes" button. But only because they've clicked your "Yikes!" button first.  

All pics from Phantasmagoria Orlando

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