A mischievous look at consumer culture: GuruGuru
 

“You have been told what to do every moment of the day, for years on end. The voice in your headphones has understood who you are and gives instructions which mirror what you’d be doing anyway. A life free of dither and uncertainty! In your job, this voice is a career-saver… but the day has come when you need to come ‘off the headphones’. You need help.”

This is the setting for a new production at London-based Camden’s People’s Theater: GuruGuru. Created by Ant Hampton, who is a member of artistic collective Rotozaza, in collaboration with film-maker Joji Koyama and electronic composer Isambard Khroustaliov, GuruGuru, which means ’round and round’ in Japanese, takes a mischievous and surreal look at focus groups, self-help culture and the consumer mindset.
Only performed for/with five people each time, the five theatre goers will enter a brightly lit room where five chairs are positioned around a TV. A session begins, and as each audience member follows different instructions via headphones, they begin to understand ‘who they are’.

Proceedings are led by an on-screen, animated character whose twin roles of marketing and spiritual guru are confused by his reliance on untested and accident-prone technologies.

The production hopes to unsettle our dependency on self help books and consumerism: “The overproduced, digital sheen of our focus-group world cracks open into a colorful volcano of boiling absurdity. A hilarious chaos develops, exposing today’s consumer-mad inability to distinguish between what we want, and what we need.”

Elf - Elf's, mischievous little people

 

Elf

	Little People's Market

Originally a supernatural dwarfish being of Germanic mythology, an elemental spirit of the land, sea and forest, possessed of magical powers which it used for the good or ill of mankind.

Later the name was used for a malignant imp, and then for fairy creatures that dance on the grass in the full moon, such as a mountain fay or, usually, as a small sprite.

	Sprite Needs His Socks Darned By a Dragonfly Who Is Sitting On a Mushroom

Mischievous elves are thought to bring evil, especially bad dreams.

In recent times elves became popularized into larger creatures, near to the size of a human being, loving music and magic and are generally peaceful forest dwellers.

In the middle-1800s Scandinavian writers such as Thile, Toplius, Rydberg sketched the elves' true role in modern life: fairies that are somewhat mischievous, but the true friends and helpers of Father Christmas (Santa Claus). They are the Christmas elves.