An Exquisite Corpse is a play (or poem or work of art) gradually created by a group of people. Each writer only sees the line previous to the one she is writing, etcetera. The result is a strange, funny, and wondrous thing. You can imagine. It's almost as though it were invented by The Surrealists, which of course it was.
It’s a game and a social event as well as a piece of theater. It is being done as a tribute and mini-revival of The San Francisco Cacophony Society who did events like this in the 80’s and 90’s based on the original Exquisite Corpse artistic game invented by the surrealists. Back then they used typewriters and then “Xeroxed” copies of the compiled script for the actors. Naturally as we looked at doing a new version, we knew we needed to make an App for that.
While we are creating this for a June 5th, 2013 event, we intend to continue a series of theater events inspired by Exquisite Corpse in the future and to develop the app accordingly. Eventually we’ll enable audiences to contribute remotely in real time and add all kinds of bells and whistles.
Right now the core functionality is a web app that sets up structured, timed writing sessions that give you a small window on what has been written before and that assembles a complete script, ready for printing and able to highlighted by character.
You can ask Mikl Em any questions about the use cases, future ideas, or why the hell he got this started at [email protected]