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RATCATCHER – PAST SIMULATIONS
[THE DREAMS OF AURIANE, SPRING 2008]
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"One of the beauties of teaching is that there is no limit to one's growth as a teacher, just as there is no knowing beforehand how much your students can learn."
--Herbert Kolb
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
THE DREAMS OF AURIANE
Spring 2008
Set at a time in the not-too-distant future in Montreal, Canada, The Dreams of Auriane centers on a blind girl, age 11, named Auriane St. Cyr. Despite her affliction, Auriane is a championship-level player of video games; her favorite character is Lady Lara Croft. Auriane's father Victor is one of the world's richest individuals, yet one whose wealth has been earned at prohibitive cost including massive violations of social and legal conventions, such as exploiting the environment and using abusive child labor practices. Victor is facing legislative hearings and almost certain indictments for these practices. On the eve of the first of these hearings, his daughter Auriane is scheduled to receive an emergency operation that can have only one of two outcomes: either Auriane will have her sight restored, or she will die.
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In Auriane's hospital room is an elderly woman, Edna MacCauley, who, as Fate would have it, has a tangled and complex history with Auriane. Years earlier, Edna worked at a Catholic school for handicapped children in Montreal, but while there learned that a breakaway sect of teachers and administrators of the Dominican order were pursuing a secret project focused on Auriane, purportedly because she was the figure prophesied centuries earlier, destined to lead a revolution to overthrow precisely the kind of despised robber baron her father had become. During the night before her operation, Auriane learns from Edna who she really is and falls into a deep sleep where she dreams three dreams that reveal to her what her destiny is and who she will become.
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The Dreams of Auriane provided an astounding amount of "real world" experience to students in the technical and creative aspects of external organizational communication; literally, in the production phase leading up to the final performance, we produced and taped Auriane's three dreams in three adjacent DuSable Hall classrooms, one of which was a soundstage; one of which was for blocking, makeup, and costumes; and one of which was for creative brainstorming, prep, and rehearsal. Despite this, the simulation was not all it could have been; that spring semester was plagued by excessively cold weather as well as the tragedy of the Cole Hall shootings. The Dreams of Auriane was also the only simulation we have done that did not have a core set of readings for all students to follow, which may have contributed to a lack of cohesion in the class (though the other factors mentioned certainly played a significant role).
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Fun Facts and Trivia
-- The prophetic, Nostradamus-like poem used by the renegade Dominican sect as proof of Auriane's destiny was translated into Middle French (depicted below, with English translation) by Professor Philippe Willems of the NIU Department of Foreign Language and Literature.
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-- The natal astrological "birthchart" of Auriane St. Cyr (see below), which of course is key to the prophecy about her, is based partly on the natal charts of former class member Betsy Petrie (A Murder in Crihloth) and of Professor Hui-Ching Chang, wife of the instructor, both of whom were born within five days of each other, under the sign Aries, as was Auriane.
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-- Auriane's prowess at playing video games, though blind, was inspired by the true story of Brice Mellen, a 15-year-old survivor of Leber's disease, which left him blind from birth, yet who regularly decimated fully sighted opponents in the video game Mortal Kombat.
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