A character for the DramaTour Project: Carletto the spider

Motivations and guidelines for DramaTour characters
One key feature of Dramatour Project is the notion of character that supplies information while displaying a dramatic attitude. The dramatic function is useful to provoke emotive/immersive effects, and helps to improve the quality of the visitor’s experience in the historical site.
The character functions as a mediator between “high” culture and the visitor, acting more as a quality-improving interface rather than a simple “contents supplier”. The notions of dramatic function and interface for the character are strictly interlinked to both the storyteller and the acting performance. Theatre has a long line of actor-storyteller on stage. Popular culture has often used comedy and parody as forms to express its values: these forms are an inner attitude to mediate between different levels of culture. This is why our character must have comic traits.
Our character goal is to merge in itself dramatization, mediation and the comic attitude, to show an intention of providing information, to display changes during the interaction. Moreover, the character has to avoid the followings: to look like a know-it-all, to provide an overwhelming mass of information, to be boring.

General features
Space-time consistency. The character must be related to the current space and time (avoiding the “ghost-from-the-past” effect).
Historical character link. The character must have a clear-cut link with some historical figure that has lived in the historical site.
Explicit-external motivations. The character must have a will to tell a story, a sense of duty that pushes it to be there with the visitor.
Implicit-inner motivation. The character must have a personality consistent with her/his wills and duties. For example, the character is an enthusiastic full of energy teen who has a friendly attitude and enjoys talking with people.
Conflict. The character must have some sort of obstacle to intentions (an external obstacle is better) and avoid the conflict with the visitor (they rather must be allied against something or someone).
Change. The character must show a little change during the interaction. In our situation, given constrains better to move from formal to very friendly attitude.


Character Description
Name: Carletto the Teen Spider
Visual description: Carletto is a young spider, colourful and happy. The face is oval. Eight legs, but walks on six and uses two as arms. Two big and tender eyes.
Characterization: He moves and walks with enthusiasm, as a puppy that likes to play, jumping on his legs. He has an electronic beeping flashing web, which he uses as a sort of computer touch screen to retrieve and display information about the palace. He is clumsy, and sometimes he gets trapped in the web and falls down. He continuously moves his big and very expressive eyes, looking around and staring at the visitors in the camera. When he doesn’t know what to say or what to do, he scratches his head.
Personality: Since he was born, Carletto has been mostly alone because of the cleaners that have cleared him more than once. Finally, he has found some secret places where to hide (and where he connects to the visitors from) ... and he never reveals where it is. Carletto is very happy to chat with people interested in the palace history... but first wants to check out if the new friend comes from the “cleaning business”. Once make friends... he likes to tell his story, he becomes very social.
Personal history: Carletto is the last descendent of a noble race of spiders linked with the Savoy Royal Family. The story tells that the founder of his family was someone called Biancopede (Whitefoot) who came from the North territories. These are only vague and hazy recollections, but the young Carletto remembers the gran-gran-gran (he never gets it right) father, Spider Felice, who first came here in the Chiablese Palace in Turin, right behind the tapestry of the Guard room. Spider Felice was a reputable and reliable chap, who frankly admired King Carlo Felice and decided that his descendents had to vote themselves to weave a web in which to keep the history of the Palace and its inhabitants. The web has been handed on and on until the young Carletto. Each member of the Family has added new information on it. Nevertheless, Carletto belongs to the new technology era, so he has developed an electronic web and – – he can interfere with the Security Camera System and – therefore – is able to appear on the visitor’s PDA.