‘Wide Slumber’, a music-theatre work by Valgeir Sigurðsson, will be premiered at Reykjavik Arts Festival, on 24 May. ‘Bedroom Community’ and ‘VaVaVoom’ have joined forces to create the piece which will tour internationally in 2015/16.
The performance is inspired by the award-winning book of poems of the same name, by a.rawlings, tracking the stages of sleep and pairing them with the life cycle of lepidopterae (butterflies and moths). The promotion text says: « 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? »
In the staging of ‘Wide Slumber’ the audience is to be 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. There are three singers embodying the Somnopterist, the Insomniac and the Lepidopterist.
A team of scientists including Harvard University lepidopterists and University College London sleep research scientists are working closely with the artists in the creation of ‘Wide Slumber’.
