The Imaginarium of Dreams is an evening of audio-visual live performance, music, video, dance, theatre and spoken word. An immersive encounter with light, sound and imagination. Take a journey into the unknown, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, surrender to the void and drift into a world of uncanny dreams. Let us take you with us as we explore the subconscious and unpick reality for one night only.
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
A We Shine Portsmouth event – Portsmouth’s very own major street art and light festival, Friday 19th Nov. 2021.
- Location: The Studio Theatre, Portsmouth Guildhall, Guildhall Square, Portsmouth PO1 2AB.
LIVE PERFORMANCES
Triskele – Xuân Sinden, Mai Butoh & Rebecca Alice George
An inter-generational journey as an old mother, her son & his wife and new mother travel through time and space.
Celebrating the birth of a new generation and a rite of passage connecting us as a family and as co-artists. The three interlocked spiral motifs of the Celtic Triskele symbolise the three stages of life in macro and microcosm. Those triple themes are explored visually through the skies, lands and waters filmed by Xuân Sinden. The field recordings, visuals, and soundtrack create an ambience of mundane eeriness providing an environment for live improvised Butoh dance, vocal loops, oscillating synths and percussion.
Duration – Dr Lighthouse & Drunken Forest
Science measures time, we experience time. In experience, there is no past, present, or future, only duration.
The performance remixes found video with material from the German TV series Dark (2019) travelling through an audio-visual wormhole to question everything we know about reality. The performance is a collaboration with Tokyo based sonic artist Drunken Forest and Dr Lighthouse, a Southsea based AV artist and filmmaker. The performance situates the audience experience in a multi-sensory domain employing aleatoric techniques and live remixing to juxtapose the didactic linear narrative practices of filmmaking with the polyphonic narrative of AV performance.
Dissonant dreams – Kim Balouch, Tim Cook and Christine Lawrence
More disturbing than the unknown is a distortion of the familiar.
Sinister yet familiar, imagined voices, ruptured reality and echos from the void. Dissonant dreams explores the unease we feel when a familiar face or place becomes unfamiliar or threatening; as in dreams and nightmares, or when encountering death, decay, dilapidation and even mental illness. The piece features video footage, spoken word and a sonic soundscape played live.
The search to belong – Svetlana Ochkovskaya
A new series of wearable sculptures, installations, live performances, and film.
The performer wearing a wearable costume (made from red sphagnum moss) will be walking and engaging with the audience. Through performances in otherworldly wearable sculptures in unexpected places, the artist explores the connection between people, places and nature: encouraging new perceptions of the world by taking the audience to a visual Other. The work is fantastic and strange, exploring ideas of identity, belonging, and otherness. It seeks to make familiar things unfamiliar; give everyday experiences a new meaning; to change the way we perceive the things around us.
Suitcase shadowland – Matt Smith
Puppetry for a shop window.
Using multimedia techniques, the audience will witness the unveiling of surreal images and magical realist events. Watch as the puppeteer manipulates light, shadow objects and curious characters in front of the screen. Matt Smith is a puppeteer with 30 years of experience and has delighted audiences with his street puppetry and large-scale performances.
Cosmic Forest – Frankie Knight
‘An artist you should know about’ – Lauren Lavern BBC 6 Music
A dreamy audio-visual performance that explores the battle between mother nature and the corporations that rule. Combining trip-hop beats, guitar riffs and soaring synths, Frankie Knight delivers delicate and captivating vocals that will soundtrack her visual recordings of the beauty and destruction of nature.
What if the cat didn’t come back – Rusty Sheriff
At least 15% of cat owners lose their pet in a five-year period. 64% are found alive, 34% are not found, and 2% are found dead.
There is an increasing amount of ‘Lost’ posters adorning the streets of where we live; each with its own descriptions, tales, and distinguishing features. The domestic pet is increasingly pivotal in our family circles, and the posters reflect the desire to re-locate the familiar to the family. Everyone wants to be in the 64% bracket. Everyone wants their buddy back home. But what if the cat didn’t come back? An audio/visual performance reflecting the duality of emotions, from hope, to fear, provoking reflection in how society manifests help from within.
Towards The Ocean (Ghost Dance Redux) – Simon Heartfield & Marie Amey
A reimaging of the film Ghost Dance (1983) that examines the nature of the modern “ghost” and its relationship with technology, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature.
I first saw Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance when I was at art college many years ago and it has been a source of inspiration for several music projects ever since, though this is the first time in a live performance setting. Towards the Ocean is a distillation of Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance, recombining some favourite elements of the film, not unlike a song remix in that it reworks parts and adds new layers to create something unique. The film itself is a classic of the “hauntology” genre long before the term was coined. The new soundtrack is based on my 2020 album Mythologies, a session I recorded for Phantom Circuit radio show in 2018 and sampled elements from the original soundtrack, accompanied by stills from the film.
PRE-RECORDED AV
Apnoea – Purple Moon Oneironauts
Francesca Bonci’s visual poetry walks us through a journey through the emotions she felt during this difficult pandemic year.
This is a visual improvisation, and the soundscape is also improvised. This work also talks about the mood and frustration of isolation for people who have suffered from depression. The pandemic and the lock-down experience also led people to discover how the most familiar environment par excellence, the home, was suddenly unknown, hostile, full of dark and dark corners. Someone, however, found something to hold onto, a light of hope that pierces the blanket of anxiety. Being the result of improvisation increases the pathos and brings it to a level of performance imbued with emotion.
Soundscape by Lorenzo Soldano aka A Perfect Place to Die.
1001 Nights – Anabela Costa
The collective unconscious adopts certain myths.
The film explores the reason why such the world of popular stories/tales and how they populate the west’s imaginary with Aladdin, Scheherazade, Ali Ababa for example. Tales that are between representation and imaginary, coloured ambiences, movements, flying objects, all bringing to the world the message that it should not ever stagnate, giving us the great lesson of Dream. Here, my interpretation throughout out a macro gaze of spots, forms, colours in movement that lead you to abstraction.
Music by Jean-Claude Heudin & Angelia
Five Words – Black Powder Engine
Tell us about your world in five words: reach, isolate, plan, calm, reflect.
I work for a charity called Music Fusion. We are a young person friendly recording studio in Havant. During the first few weeks of Lockdown in March 2020, Music Fusion offered an online challenge to the young people who attended our studio. The brief was “share a song or rap with us. Your music should use the following five words: reach, isolate, plan, calm, reflect”. I was genuinely inspired by the young people’s responses to our lockdown projects. I had some spare time, so I sampled a talented young artist called Aya Elmansouri and remixed this track and video.
Introduction by Matt Stevens – Vocal by Aya Elmansouri – Music and video production by Jinx Prowse.
Thank you to all the performers, students, volunteers and everyone who made this event possible!
