MEDIATHEK

"Pattern your breath on the sound of moth wings, magnified and frenzied, as you fight for sleep in a suffocating tangle of sheets. This is a poetic fantasia, an erotic nightmare-scape. So we dream the same – do we dream the same?"

Wide Slumber is an evening long music theatre performance weaving together live music composed by Valgeir Sigurðsson with visuals crafted by VaVaVoom Theatre (S. Sunna Reynisdóttir & Sara Martí).

The performance is inspired by the award-winning book of poems Wide slumber for lepidopterists by a.rawlings,The poems are a disorienting yet compelling dreamscape of butterflies and caterpillars and killing jars, where the waking mind’s prose transforms into the sleeper’s poetry. Tracking the stages of sleep and pairing them with the life cycle of Lepidopterae (butterflies and moths), insomnia is mirrored in the birth of the egg, narcolepsy in larval hatching. And when the caterpillar starts its final moult, dreams begin, weaving around us as tightly as a cocoon until we are somnambulant, a chrysalis ready to emerge as a moth.

In the staging of Wide Slumber the audience is lulled into a cocoon where the borders between dreams and reality are blurred. A group of singers, musicians, and performers conjure an ethereal and visceral world of cyclic metamorphosis through music, puppetry and moving scenography. Each of the three singers embody personae within the original text; The Insomniac, The Lepidopterist and The Somnopterist.

The performance was developed during residencies and presented gradually through concerts, installations, short videos / trailers and performances, leading up to the rehearsal period in the end of April 2014. We presented a 15 minute taster of the performance during APAP in New York in January 2014, at the SoHo theatre loft of David Lang and Suzanne Bocanegra. A short video was launched in February and the project was a part of Vinnslan; the opening of Tjarnarbíó theatre on March 29th.

A team of scientists including Harvard University lepidopterists and University College London sleep research scientists worked closely with the artists in the creation of Wide Slumber. We have curated a series of events to be presented in tandem with the performance, such as a butterfly pinning workshop and lectures on the metamorphoses of butterflies and the different stages of sleep.