Bren O’Callaghan A Runaway at the Media Circus!

Black Elk and friends

It’s getting closer to delivery of my Larkin’ About / Library Theatre Company pervasive gaming commission at Manchester Histories Festival, Saturday 3^rd March. The play test earlier this month was a valuable opportunity at a dry run, given that restrictions at the event site are preventing the design group from access prior to the day. Sure, we can pop in, sign into the visitor’s book and walk around, but we can’t know how our activities will bed down or clash with the existing usage and architecture of the building until the doors are flung open and we storm the palace.

Sioux warriors in Salford

My own game, Prairieland, requires participants to hunt down the animal totems of six Native Sioux who found themselves abandoned in Salford and Manchester after Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Exhibition and Congress of Rough Riders left after a successful extended stay in 1887-8. The animals are represented by transparent, colour-tagged balloons, camouflaged in full sight against the ornate gothic ceilings. On the reverse of each tag is an encrypted message, which must be decoded by the player using a sacred strip to reveal the name of the associated Sioux, although some are empty and require repeat attempts.

One of the Native Sioux Indians affected, Black Elk, wrote about his subsequent two-year journey to return home to North Dakota via London, Paris and Germany in his memoir, Black Elk Speaks. The fate of the rest remains unknown, although additional members of the troupe, including Sioux, stayed on in Manchester and Salford, married and integrated amongst the population. It is likely that some of the accompanying animals, from bison to elk and bronco, died of natural causes during their sojourn and are even now buried in local soil. Desiccated, dissolved and dispersed, their spirits seep and bleed through burrows beneath the ground to emerge and regroup in latex bubbles above.