Photographed by Dom Pamatmat
Tarzeer Pictures invites audiences to a spectacle of apparitions that celebrates life and death.
Tarzeer Pictures’ production at the 2024 edition of the Fifth Wall Fest is like stepping into a portal. Music can barely be contained behind an unassuming door, its beats muffled but persistent. Flashes of light pulse from within, casting fleeting shadows, hinting at the energy waiting on the other side. But once you cross the threshold, the room is empty, save for one presence: The Rave Ghost, a lone figure drifting through the space.
Of course, this is an illusion. The Rave Ghost is a 14-minute video installation featuring model Kurt Vicencio as the titular figure. “They pitched it to me as a character beyond human, dancing as if it were the greatest party ever,” Vicencio explains. The footage is projected onto a screen, with smoke adding a haunting, immersive layer to the experience.
Fifth Wall is an international platform dedicated to dance and movement. For Tarzeer Pictures’s entry to the fifth edition of the festival, the inspiration came to the team during their first ocular visit to the 2024 venue, at Narcisa “Doña Sisang” Buencamino de Leon’s residence in Quezon City.
“After we had been invited to the festival by Madge and Fifth Wall, we went on our first ocular when the house was empty and filled with all sorts of stuff. It was quite spooky, and historical,” Tarzeer Pictures co-founder Gio Panlilio shares. “So we thought that maybe some of the ghosts would want to dance too.”
Vicencio was transformed into The Rave Ghost by makeup artist Myrene Santos, with costume design by fashion designer Kelvin Morales. Santos, a theater hair and makeup artist for over a decade, used her experience with oil based face and body paint for Vicencio’s look. “The brief for the makeup said that the model had to dance a lot and had outfit changes, which meant that the makeup needed to be water and transfer proof. It worked because we had a hard time removing it.”
For The Rave Ghost to come to life, Vicencio choreographed the movements himself. “I was told to draw on previous party experiences,” the model says. “I personally haven’t done that in a long time, so it was like learning how to ride a bicycle. I was asked to do a variety of expressions too, as if my body was shifting into spirit.”
In Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magick, written in the early 1500s, he describes a technique for creating the illusion of “ghosts” using light, centuries before the invention of projection machines. This historical method may help explain why ghostly apparitions in contemporary imagery are often depicted as faint, not fully human figures. This traditional method of smoke and mirrors spun into the contemporary with digital technology complemented the team’s interest in horror.
“We are big, big horror fans, it is something that only sound and moving images can conjure. It’s futuristic and ancient at the same time, just like a rave,” Panlilio says. “Horror is also total optimism as it gives creative license to imagine the greatest of unknowns. To simulate fear is fun and horror is metaphorically good soil to dig in.”
The installation itself, in a small room at a historic mansion, was unsettling on its own. However, with digital technology at its center, the possibilities are endless. One could imagine the footage in a bigger setting, apparitions amidst a sea of people, an imagination straight out of a Gaspar Noé film. It speaks volumes to the profound impact ferried by initiatives like the Fifth Wall Fest, an analysis of the human condition through various forms of creativity.
As the adage says, death is a fact of life. How humans create and attempt to visually illustrate the afterlife, such as the depiction of The Rave Ghost, is telling of the natural human curiosity of what happens when life is lost. Perhaps it is subconsciously a coping mechanism to understand death, or a resistance to it. Art, after all, lives on. As the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night… Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.“
