NO SLEEPING

Dreaming doesn’t need a bedroom. It’s more that the bedroom needs the dream.

Or is it that the bedroom needs the dreamer, to become a place for dreaming?

In my search for a connection between historic homes open to the public and my own relationship to the private, non-historic site of my son’s bedroom, I wrote NO SLEEPING, an interactive multi-media performance that takes a winding walk through spaces of light and darkness.

Through spoken word, soundscapes, and video projection, this thought piece on preservation is a devotional investigation of place and memory that asks the audience to move out of the mindset of simply watching, to become a collaborator through the gentle direction of Sue Murad.

NO SLEEPING celebrates the photographic impulse to commemorate and preserve, while ruminating on futures lost.  The shapeshifting nature of grief guides this interactive performance, with an array of devices that use light in a photographic manner (historic, low tech, and the technology of now), to occupy rooms and bedrooms of historic homes where someone remembered may have slept. Sue Murad and I are artists in residence at the Meetinghouse in Harvard, MA to develop a template for NO SLEEPING, with a goal of performing the work at historic sites (with bedrooms) across the country. We are currently actively seeking hosting partnerships with historic house museums and historic homes.

We are hosting performances this spring, so if you are interested in joining an audience at an historic site, please fill out the form below.

Curated by Shana Dumont Garr

Written, filmed by DTW

Co-Created and performed with Sue Murad

Gastronomy by Maureen Coffey