Red Gorge is a communitarian soap operatic engagement co-written, performed, photographed, directed, designed, edited, & composed for by everyone who is making it, however they think to, however they like to, whenever they do. Shot entirely on location in the rural mountaintop town of Prattsville, NY, participants ranging broadly in age, interest & experience plot schemes & shoot footage that is regarded as common to all involved in the process. The ongoing project's form and content mutually reflect of the character of the town, a community and landscape that is constantly re-imagining itself as it rebuilds itself in the wake of devastation from Hurricane Irene. It's style is ad-hoc & can-do. Its organization is as decided unruly & decentralized as its elaborately schemed plot, extending in all directions, involving complex intermeshes of intergenerations of ingenuity, mistaken identity, corroboration & revenge. Its ontogenetic shape is characterized by its excess. As the soap opera progresses, several distinct episodes comprising much of the same footage emerge, each cobbled entirely differently. Thus, episode to episode, the story veers wildly–– variously haunting, hokey, whimsical, tactical–– sometimes trained on the story at hand, sometimes accounting for the way it was made by the ones who made it. Likewise, single characters are frequently played by different actors as often as an actor appears as more than one character. This insistence on regeneration is reflected in the proliferation of suddenly appearing secret twins, bouts with amnesia & visitations by ghostly presences as well as in the correlative development of the actual, physical infrastructure of Prattsville. The centrally located Prattsville Art Center serves as the headquarters & clubhouse for the project & participants make their mark on the building, too, by installing, decorating or constructing screening areas.
Red Gorge is a platform for encouraging everyone to do something they love & try something altogether new. As a colloquial form, the soap opera is immediately accessible to everyone––even non-fans––as an idea of a story that resists entropy, that persists in spite of sense. It is a medium through which people practice mutability. The making of Red Gorge is itself a kind of liminal ritual, one in which constituent members co-learn adaptation and resilience. Complexly networked diagrams, drawn by the participants collectively, illustrate the causal connections among the shifting cast and fictional residents of "Red Gorge." These accounts on long scrolls of butcher paper are the traces of all the energies that inform the project, collectively tending & revealing itself to itself.
Red Gorge episode: The Dawning of Gilda, or Gilda at Last (trailer) from Bethany Ides on Vimeo.