Alex Harbich

For thousands of years, mankind has been telling stories whose characters follow a pattern of psychologically substantiated role models: the so-called Archetypes. These dramaturgical prototypes have experienced a continuous use in modern literature and film. Therefore, they have formed an immanent idea of good and evil, of comedy, drama and, most importantly, of what heroes should be. With this work, I am staging these characters as the collective identity they have become, due to their unspoken presence in modern storytelling. This concept is based on the research of Christopher Vogler, who identified seven archetypes as the baseline of storytelling. At the heart of this work is the figure of the hero. The hero who in himself unites the sum of the individual qualities of the archetypes of mentor, shapeshifter, trickster, herald, guardian and shadow. In Storytelling, these role models often lead to stereotypical characters and therefore encourage prejudice of how people should be in the real world. My approach on portraying these figures is to break these expectations by taking away the glorification.