This week, screenwriter and critic Martyn Pedler joined us in Parkes for activities based on his 2011 movie EXIT.
EXIT follows a group of people who have come to believe that reality is a maze, thousands of years old. Human beings have lived in the maze for so long that some have settled down, had families, forgotten the impulse to escape. But the fabled exit door is still out there, for those who remember.
The Parkes team have already made youth activities featuring zombies, time travel, and kaiju. We wanted to build on this and offer something a little more cerebral. The premise of Martyn’s movie offers the perfect springboard for a range of games and creative play.
Martyn spent Tuesday in the library at Parkes High School, where he spoke about his career to over 200 students across two 90-minute sessions. They heard him explain how EXIT began with his 2008 exhibition Melbourne and Other Myths.
Martyn had become bored with the city he’d lived in for many years and was trying to reignite his love for Melbourne by creating new urban legends. For example, Houdini had visited in 1910. He dived into one of the city’s rivers. What, Martyn asked, if some of his unique magic had spilled into the water and infected Melbourne for generations to come?
The Old City Treasury Museum transformed these fantasies into a three-month exhibition. Melbourne and Other Myths presented Martyn’s words alongside found objects. In the exhibition, the stories became secret histories. And one of these myths, about a cult who believe the city is a maze they must escape, inspired EXIT.
In our first EXIT activity, Parkes teens created their own myths for an exhibition of weird and wonderful objects. You can find the instructions for ‘Curating Modern Myths’ below.
Curating Modern Myths
You’ll need:
- A selection of intriguing objects (at least 1 for every 4 participants)
- 1 file card for every 4 participants
- Rough paper and pencils
- 1 coloured token for each participant
- A prize for the winning group
Instructions:
1. Form a group of 3-4.
2. Choose an object from the collection.
3. Have each person in your group tell a story about the object. It can be as weird or as magical or as gruesome as you wish…
4. Choose one story from your group or combine your stories to create a single myth.
5. Write the main ideas from your myth on paper.
6. Collect a file card. You’ll use this to label your object in the exhibition.
7. Write a description of your object and your urban myth on the card.
8. Nominate a curator of your object, who will stay with it and explain its story to others.
9. Other members of group collect a token and walk around the exhibition, talking to the other groups’ curators.
10. Give the token to the curator of your favourite exhibit.
11. Each group’s curator will record all the tokens for their exhibit on the scoreboard (we used a whiteboard).
12. The urban myth with the most votes will win a PRIZE!
Over the coming school year, Parkes students will continue to create activites based on EXIT. Staff and students will make and play games based on the themes of mapping, puzzles, escape, and a world beyond the everyday – and you’ll find those games outside of the classroom too, on the school campus and even on the streets of the town.
My personal favourite from Tuesday’s activity was the “Cold War atomic briefcase” whose dual locks had to be simultaneously released to prevent a detonation.
I think the students who came up with that need to watch Kiss Me Deadly before too long…
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 