Not long ago, I read a rather philosophical question on social media: ‘What do NPCs do when they think nobody’s watching?’ Austrian company Hungry Sharks’ latest production, Destination FCKD is the perfect answer to this question. But let’s start with the basics, because if you, like me, are neither a gamer nor a member of Gen Z, you might need an explanation of what an NPC actually is. Luckily, choreographer Valentin Alfery and producer Dušana Baltić provide us with a whole glossary of this subculture.
NPC (non-player character) is a character in a game that is not controlled by a player, its main function being to populate the game’s world, thus making it more real. ‘They execute repeating tasks, communicate with a highly restricted vocabulary and act in pre-defined loops,’ says the glossary. Apparently, in youth slang NPC also means a person who has little originality and creativity, and is very bland. Somewhat contradictorily, there’s also the current trend of NPC-ing, where people embody non-player characters in real life, turning the boring digital underdog into creative analogue hero. This phenomenon was the main inspiration for Alfery, who, together with his six female dancers developed a library of almost 200 NPCs to chose from for the final piece, including backward cat, face-eating alien or bipolar squid.
Alfery’s background is in urban and club dancing, and techniques of those styles – stops, reversions, glitches – make a great match for the repetitive and disrupted behaviour of NPCs. Each dancer has a very distinctive, visually striking appearance (cat-lady, sporty schoolgirl, reptile), but they also move between characters. The limitations of NPCs are not only reflected in their restricted movement sequences, but also in their half-formed sentences and compulsorily repeated sound effects.
While developing an NPC is a choreographic act in its own right, the restricted and solitary qualities of these characters mean that it’s hard to get them to interact or place them in performative situations. But perhaps it’s only fitting that Destination FCKD feels fragmented and random at times: it is an authentic reflection of a world that abounds in creativity on one hand, but can be overwhelming, paralysing and so very silly on the other.
