Created by: Arielle Gray, Rachel Claudio, Luke Kerridge & Tim Watts

Behind closed office doors lies a world where ambition mutates into obsession, and where employees lose face… literally. This is a city alive with menace and absurdity. Paper puppets chase impossible dreams with disastrous results. Cults take root in corporate rituals. Car chases erupt in shadowed streets where tigers roam. Power struggles spiral into fights to the death, while fluorescent lights flicker, fans turn endlessly, and nightmares seep through every crack in the architecture.

With its striking blend of cardboard puppetry, bold projection, and an original synth-driven score, Dark Peterson creates a theatrical universe at once surreal, playful, and disturbingly familiar. Each story stands alone, yet all are connected; threads in a dark tapestry of corporate magic and human folly.

Dark Peterson (working title) is in the very early stages of creation, having just undergone a one-week initial development. Even in this short time, we uncovered the seeds of a striking visual style, the beginnings of story threads, and the texture of a world we are eager to explore further. Our next stage of development will focus on expanding this playful, unsettling, and imaginative universe into fully realised scenes, deepening both narrative and form.

The work will unfold as a series of interconnected short stories; multiple narratives that both stand alone and intersect in unexpected ways. Like in the movie Sin City, the world itself becomes a protagonist: the corporation, the building, the city all carry personality and menace. The stories that surface are only the tip of the iceberg, hinting at countless untold tales lurking beneath. This is a world where reality blurs into the supernatural. Characters can lose their faces, joining the anonymous ranks on the “faceless floor” of the corporation. Corporate rituals spill into cult-like worship. Floors swallow people. Tigers stalk city streets, devouring the unwary. A dark corporate magic thrums beneath everything, unsettling yet strangely seductive. The tone sits at the collision of corporate satire, noir, horror, and absurdist play.

Our visual language builds from stark contrasts: a monochromatic world of projection and shadow, disrupted by bursts of colour from handmade puppets. We are experimenting with front projection on mesh, creating silhouettes of architectural details; a ceiling fan slowly rotating, fluorescent lights flickering, the geometric shards of light through windows. This projection design doesn’t just set the scene but also illuminates the puppets, creating a layered interplay between light, shadow, and character.

The puppets themselves are crafted from cardboard, roughly A3 in size, painted in vivid colours to stand out against the black-and-white world. Their 2D colourful style sits in contrast with the stark, 3D geometric simplicity of the projection, amplifying the surreal and graphic nature of the stories.

-Arielle Gray & Tim Watts.