Allen Turner
Journal Entries
While home during COVID-19 events I've taken to building a new deck of introspection and journaling cards. Rebus Mysteria is a return to some of the ideas I engaged with an earlier set of cards I called Arboretum Imaginarium. The original cards used images of trees that had been put through various kaleidoscopic filters to make patterns that hoped to instigate the imagination. This new variation eschews the patterns because they were a barrier for people as often as they instigated creative thought. This time I'm opting for images of nature which span across a wide spectrum of nature and include themes of air/water/fire/earth as well as images that represent close up viewings and far back viewings. There are also small words that are to be used by the participant to name the cards and help them to build their own relationship with the images and emergent narratives that are instigated by putting the images in various tarot-like spreads (which I'm calling constellations). The hope is that the images will form a rebus that allow you to connect to essential, internal narratives that are influencing one's engagement with the world. Deciphering your personal rebus allows one to connect with these ideas and extract them for deeper conversations and self-examination.
August 11, 2020
This is a link to Allen Turner’s personal blog, Council of Fools, and his latest post, Rambling Thoughts on Utopia, Speculative Fiction and the Matter of Black Lives: https://council-of-fools.com/blog/rambling-thoughts-on-utopias-speculative-fiction-the-matter-of-black-lives/?
I’ve been musing and jamming these last few nights on COVID, and BLM and all the anxieties that are making it hard to breathe these days. This is something that started to arise out of me poking about in various states of anxiety and depression. Started out as a meditation and became something else. A performance musing on the feeling of moving through 2020.
Instruments:
Korg Electribe 2 Sampler
Deepmind 12
Crave
MS-1
Performance recorded and edited in Mixcraft 9
Uptown, Chicago, week of May 24-29, 2020.
September 24, 2020
Creating Covid Choreography.
June 12, 2021
This is a character I'm developing named Ife StormCrow and he has erupted from the underworld alongside the cicada.
Allen Turner is a game designer, storyteller, artist, author, composer and performer who has been involved in storytelling and education most of his adult life. He teaches game and design at DePaul University and runs the DePaul Originals Game Studio. He believes in the power of play and story as fundamental, powerful medicines which shape our sense of self, relationships, and our connection to the cosmos.
As a storyteller he often tells myths and legends within the Native American community in Chicago. He has provided cultural performances for the Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Public, the Illinois Teachers Conference, Newberry Library, Chicago Historical Society, and myriad other organizations and institutions. He extols play as a learning tool by educating teachers, via workshops, on how to bring games and game-like learning into their class rooms to give students a sense of progression and purpose and as rites of passage.
Most recently Allen has published Ehdrigohr, a tabletop, dark fantasy, roleplaying game that explores tribal themes and allegorical battles with depression, solitude, identity, and erasure. More info on that and other projects can be found at council-of-fools.com/blog.
As a performer he enjoys exploring the narrative power of dance as a space of personal ritual and transformation via various forms of folkloric dance. His motions pull from all of his heritages and experiences with various teaches becoming a fluid blend of Raqs Sharqi, Butoh, West African, and North American Men’s Traditional and Omaha (Grass) dances.
A creator of music he explores creating psychedelic, dreamy soundscapes and danceable rhythms under the auspices of the Council OF Fools Rhythm Council.