Sweet dreams are made (2009)

«Sweet Dreams Are Made» speaks of and endeavours to articulate the experience you and I have of our unconscious processes. In doing so we approach the impossible or something on the brink of the unspeakable. We approach it with all the tools we have at hand: through translation, through kinaesthetic transference, through simple recognition, through rhythm, through extended time, through the common knowledge we share of dreams, through half logic of dreamers and the illogic of sensation. Derrida says any honest attempt at taking responsibility for ones place in the world (with all the contradictions and blind spots that implies), must bring us face to face with the impossible: “the condition of possibility of this thing responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible.” This made us think about the inconceivable or the undreamt of and we came to the plain conclusion that if one can perceive of something through dreams it can potentially be conceived of or made to exist. Our response is some of the things we are dreaming of.

We are dreaming of becoming. We are dreaming of a state of fearlessness. We are dreaming of a body that doesnt hurt…of not hurting other people…a world in which our people are calling the shots… the right body fluids at the right moment…someone who understands us, men who know what to do, affordable housing, bankers performing a musical called Crash…bouncing back…shedding masks…emerging as a beautiful butterfly…the life of an artist. We are dreaming of war (again).

In this collaborative work Simone Aughterlony and Isabelle Schad propose the theatre as being at once the space of dreaming and part of the dream itself. In their ever-evolving setting the body is capable of shifting status. The register of the performing body shifts from the quotidian and familiar to de-familiar or becoming body, from the theatrical body to the cartoon figure, the reflective body to the absent. Within this dream space they try to unravel the multiplicity of perspectives how to create a sense of the being the one observing whilst simultaneously being the subject of observation. They cultivate expressions of magical phenomena and delight in the construction of images of astonishing and uncanny coherence.

Program Notes:
She is driving around and she’s thinking, 
“All right I’m still alive, now what am I going to do?” 
So she figures she’ll go down and rent a movie. So she goes down to the video store but then she can’t remember the title of the movie she wants. So she’s describing the movie to the guy. 
“Yeah, you know it’s that black and white movie, it’s on colour film.”
“I think it stars Nicholas Cage and Hayley Mills. It’s that movie where the theatre becomes a secret place for organized meetings between two choreographers who are trying to un-do each other’s unconscious. There’s some stuff in between before the country loses the war because they accidently made their submarines out of Styrofoam and they won’t go under the water.” 
And the guy is just blankly looking at her and as she says this to him she’s realizing it’s not a movie she saw, it’s a dream she had. She’s thinking, “My God I’m trying to rent one of my own dreams.” (Which would be pretty cool actually.)
Then the guy says to her, “That’s not a movie you saw, that’s a dream you had.” 
She says, “How do you know?”
He says, “Because you were in here last week trying to rent the same thing.”
She says, “Alright, let me know when you get it in.”

In Sweet Dreams Are Made, Simone Aughterlony and Isabelle Schad propose the theatre as being at once the dream box and the setting of a dream itself. 
Visions and experiences become part of the negotiation of perspectives. But what happens to these images - with their bodies, characters, narratives, sensations and emotions when perceived through the uncanny light of sleep coherence and the half-logic of dream phenomenon? Sweet Dreams Are Made invites the spectator to the theatre to be alone together – cultivating a sense of being the dream observer whilst simultaneously generating the dream reality and its environment.