17.12.2025 / þ thorns þ

Episode Sixteen: Andrea Božić, Julia Willms and Victoria Pérez Royo

þ thorns þ

This episode is a conversation between Andrea Božić, Julia Willms and Victoria Pérez Royo. Together, they discuss research on dreams, dream logic, and the immersive virtual environments that dreams create.

This episode is a conversation between Victoria Pérez Royo, curator of the series, choreographer and artist Andrea Božić and visual artist Julia Willms. Andrea and Julia have collaborated since 2003, making interdisciplinary works that reorganise space, attention and perception, exploring how spectatorship, imagination, and spectacle are intertwined and embodied.
Together, they explore the nature and practice of capturing and interpreting dreams. They discuss research on dreams, dream logic, and the immersive virtual environments that dreams create.

Find out more about Andrea, Julia and Victoria on our People page.

To the Glossary Andrea donates Specufiction and Transduction .
Julia donates Dream Mapping and Malleability .
Victoria donates Dreaming Substance and Somatic Dreaming .

This episode, is part of a series of thorns called Dreaming Communities. It is curated by Victoria Pérez Royo and hosts invited artists who work with ‘dreaming substance.’ Here the adjective “dreaming” does not refer solely to nighttime sleep, but serves as an umbrella term for a whole series of images that have been conceived in a fragmentary and scattered way in various disciplines and practices: memories, anticipations, daydreams and night dreams, ghosts and specters, visions, and hallucinations, among others.

Here you can read a full text about the series, written by Victoria.

This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant. The series is curated by Victoria Pérez Royo with additional concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Transcript:

MARTIN:

Hello and welcome to Thorns, a podcast where we bring you conversations in relation to concepts of the choreographic . Thorns is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadlers Wells. I'm Martin Hargreaves, Head of the Choreographic School and we are compiling a glossary of words donated by people that collaborate with us. You can find this glossary on our website. I've invited performing arts researcher Victoria Pérez Royo, to curate a miniseries of the podcast, and this is how Victoria frames the ideas behind her curation.

VICTORIA:

This miniseries called Dreaming Communities; we are a group of people having conversations around what we call the dreaming substance, meaning all the work developed around images that do not appear on a material surface outside of the body.

MARTIN:

This episode is a conversation between Victoria, the curator of this series, choreographer and artist, Andrea Božić, and visual artist Julia Willms. Andrea and Julia have collaborated since 2003, making interdisciplinary works that reorganise space, attention and perception, exploring how spectatorship, imagination, and spectacle are intertwined and embodied. The conversation was recorded in a studio in Amsterdam, and together they explore the nature and practice of capturing and interpreting dreams. They discuss research on dreams, dream logic, and the immersive virtual environments that dreams create. The transition sounds you will hear in this episode are excerpts from The Cube, an audio-visual installation by Andrea and Julia.

There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website. Together with any relevant links to the resources mentioned throughout.

VICTORIA:

Well, first of all, I must say that this conversation doesn't just start now, but that we have been in conversation already, I would say since January or more when I contacted you in relation to the project of Dreaming Communities. Because I was very interested in your long research, as a years long research on dreams and inner life, that you also call that. But more particularly this weekends you hosted us alone. And we, at your studio in Amsterdam, we had a session of the Dream Archive: Live Collection in which you were capturing one dream of mine, documenting, archiving, no? And then we had a conversation also with the audience that was present. So, we are building up on this conversation. So, we probably withdraw from this conversation some, some aspects. So, but first of all, I would like to ask you about what is it this practice of capturing dreams and the general frame of your research with dreams?

ANDREA:

It's nice to be here and continue. Yeah. Because we started a conversation…well, so maybe just to say a bit about what we are doing or what the research and the practice and our work is. So, we've been working with dreams and dream logic, or at least we call it like this, since the last 10 years. But Julia and me have collaborated since 22 years, I think. And so, particularly we are interested in what happens when you, let's say, bring together two different kinds of logics, we call it. So, when they start speaking to each other, when you overlap two spaces, what happens to a sense of spectatorship? What are we attending to then, as an audience or whoever is involved in that situation. In our case, performative or an install situation. And so, we kind of came across…so we started working with specifically dreams maybe 10 years ago, because we got interested in how we talk about dreams. In a way, how dreams are already so contaminated and connotated and marginalized, as inner life. And kind of, put somewhere into the corners of all, let's say margins, of what is considered real life. But we got interested in dreams, not as kind of fragments or flashes or dreamy. But really, in what happens in this, we see them as immersive, almost virtual environments that we are immersed in at night. That are audiovisual, sensorial, emotive. That are very meaningful to us, at night. So, if they mean something deeply to us in the dream itself, but then when we wake up, we are like ‘oh I dunno why I did that?’ So, you know, we start excusing it, somehow, explaining it. I cannot explain it, why I was acting that, you know? Why was I committing incest? Or why was I, you know, murdering people? Or having a feeling of bliss when I saw a nuclear bomb, you know? And so, we got interested in that logic, what is in there?

JULIA:

We started developing a method. How to archive dreams. How to draw out the material of a dream from other people, in such a sense that we, as a public, can really imagine being in that dream of that other person. So, we developed something, what we call ‘Dream Mapping’. Which is putting the dream into the space of the here and now, retelling it in the present tense, and embodying it within the space we're in. And also, when we embody the dream, we sort of locate it in relation to the space we're in. So, we would say, for example, I’m in a gym, but the ceiling of the gym is 10 times higher than the seating of the sound studio we're sitting in right now.

ANDREA:

So, it's like you're walking through your own dreams. So, we asked the Dreamer to not tell it as an anecdote, but to kind of, what you did also yesterday. So, kind of really, to step in and see the image in front of them, of the dream, and then describe it, really what they're seeing. So that the whole kind of, to capture the whole thing out. So, this is what we call ‘Dream Mapping’. So, to place the full, to kind of draw out, the full sensorial audiovisual environment. And then the dreams are also really interesting. We got interested in their structures because they're not fragments. It's maybe how we remember them, in fragments, so it's a memory of them. But dreams are actually, have very intricate, I would call it dramaturgies, I'm a choreographer!

Andrea laughs.

ANDREA:

Or structures. They're often circular. So, we…but we…hmm. In kind of, what happens or episodic. But we got very interested in, kind of, how space-time functions there. Because, or how maybe a sense of identity functions there? Like you can be several people at the same time. You can chase yourself and be the chaser. You can be male and female. You can be with your best friend who looks like somebody else. But you also can be in a space which is inside, but it's also outside. And we got interested in how these are connected to the feeling of…the feelings in the dream. How the space also changes. And how the space speaks of, often into the shifts of, feelings in the dream. And so, we developed this mapping. And then later on, we started developing something called ‘Live Dreaming’. Which is where then, once you establish this image in the space, which is a real dream, we work with them really as a documentary material, that we can kind of guide the dreamer to also move through the dream, and continue ‘Live Dreaming’. But from this technique of having the image emerge first and then describe it, that's the practice.

VICTORIA:

How come you arrived to think about, and to practice, with dreams and so? What was the… What led you to this particular research?

JULIA:

Well, we are working already for a long time with overlapping different space-times.

ANDREA:

Or logics, yeah.

JULIA:

And different logics, where we overlap two spaces, the digital and the physical. Or an emotional space over a digital space. And therefore, we always were already busy with transforming the space we're in, through combining two logics. Which produce a third space. And this transformation and this fluidity, which then occurs between spaces, that you can find in dreams. So, it was a perfect match, let's say, as another space which already has it inherently encoded into it.

ANDREA:

We were gonna visit with this idea of internal and external and what is, you know, the continuity, let's say. If you think about it as a Möbius strip. So, what we consider as our internal stage, I like thinking about where is stage, so the stage is…so if your internal life is your inner stage, you know, and how is that connected to what you consider is outer stage, or the stage that you're in.

So, we are very much thinking about a relationship with attention and space. And how when you reorganize this attention, the logic of attention of space, you start, yeah, there's just something that happens, in a sense of perception of the situation. Somehow, I think we got into dreams also, because we met Mala Kline. When I started working with her, I think I was, maybe she was a student at DAS, and I was her advisor, a mentor. And she was working with this particular dreaming, or embodied dreaming practice that I got more interested in. And so, we also started studying that with her. She told us also ‘well, you're already working with dreams, kind of, your work is already dream logic’. And somehow it was also a conversation where we started then developing this embodied dreaming. Like really putting it into the space, and kind of practicing with that. And then it became a thing of its own, I think.

JULIA:

Yeah. And we…one of the first projects was that we embodied dreams into buildings and created-

ANDREA:

-mapped them.

JULIA:

Mapped them into buildings. And then created trajectories where we were walking with the public through the buildings, and in different parts of the buildings, we would locate different sorts of dreams. So, that was actually the beginning, I would say.

VICTORIA:

Hmm.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: The Cube

ANDREA:

Well, I was thinking maybe you can tell us a bit about your Dreaming Communities project. And especially I'm very curious about…because you say that you are working with the dream substance, and so maybe you can tell us a bit what your research is? And how you're thinking about, also I'm also curious how you're thinking about the dream substance?

VICTORIA:

Yeah. Dreaming Communities is an ongoing laboratory that we started one year ago, and we will be working with it for the next three years, probably around it. So, the idea is that a group of people interested in, what I call, the ‘Dreaming Substance’ - I will come to that later - we share our practices, our interests. We learn together, we research together. This group of people is a group of artists and researchers, mainly from Spain, but also, we are also developing collaborations as with you, with other people in different countries. And the idea is to do research from the practices. And change, learn together and so on. What brings us together is that we all work with images that have no material body, outside. They do not appear necessarily in a surface, in a material surface, outside of the human body. Meaning we are working with visions, remembrances, I don't know… images of the future. We are working with daydreams, night dreams, hallucinations, no? Which is all those kinds of images that, as you said before, were not taken so much into consideration in the Western tradition, in terms of proper knowledge and proper science, so to say. So, we always despise them a bit.

And one of the premises of this work, is that those images, their fundamental place, the place in which they live, is the human body. Of course, there are also images traveling through many other bodies that are not human. But we are working on those that belong to our bodies. So, there have been many different disciplines working with them. Some psychoanalysis, on the other hand, phenomenology, anthropology. So, there are different disciplines that have been working with all those different kinds of images. But what I think that holds them together, is this idea that it is in the body, or in the bodies that they reside, that they appear, that they go through them. So, meaning that, then when we say dreaming communities, we are not just referring to images of night dreams, but also of daydreams, or of visions. All the time departing from the idea that, I think Mala Kline also proposed, that it's very beautiful, the idea that the body is always dreaming. And so, that images are the primary language of the body. And that the body is night and daydreaming all the time. Only during the night we are more…we are not distracted by other inputs, or it's more evidence the way it thinks, and it expresses itself. That's why all the artists, they are coming from dance, choreography, live arts. Not because we are really focusing on the dynamics of these images, of their ways of existence, of how they operate, how they create communities around them, how they swarm our entanglements of those images and the bodies.

TRANSITION SOUND: The Cube

JULIA:

Because like on the one hand, yeah, it's this immaterial body, but then you call it substance. And for me substance is a very material word.

VICTORIA:

Yeah. Actually, the very first gesture of Dreaming Communities is to highlight their existence. So…And then this expression of dreaming substance comes from the Cartesian attempt, or no, it was not attempted, it was very successful! How he created a simplified and dichotomised ontology that divides the worlds into two types of being. He says there is the res extensa, the extended substance, which exists materially and occupies the space. And there is the thinking substance, the res cogitans, which is the rational activity of the mind. And then this partition, this dual ontology lives completely out of the world of images, that mediates between human beings. All the imaginal density that surrounds bodies, through which we understand our own bodies, through which we act, that influence us so much, no? That shapes the very universe in which we live. And then following this vocabulary, that of substances. What I proposed with this name, was to point at this whole world, that has been expelled out, condensed to not having reality. And then I thought that would be…so if we were to compliment this dichotomous world, bringing a third substance that would be the dreaming substance. Or in Latin, res somniums. That would be precisely, everything that we do not see, taking up space in the world, that we do not think about in rational terms, but which clearly exists and shapes our bodies and our lives. And that many cultures throughout the world have recognized in many different ways.

JULIA:

Yeah. No, I also…like, one of the words I picked for myself was malleability. The word malleability says something about the ability of material to deform under compressive stress without breaking.

VICTORIA:

Mm-hmm.

JULIA:

And I think this fits very well to, in general, the images you are talking about. But also about dream images. That they are able to constantly transform and take on another body or another shape. Or they shift. And they always find the way in between. And they don't go out of existence if you don't see them.

VICTORIA:

Yeah, for me, this is one of the features of those images that I find more interesting. And the idea that an image in a dream or in a hallucination. That so, on the one hand they are images that you can never capture and dominate, as you have when you record with a camera, or when you take a picture. You know that you say ‘I captured reality, and it is that, and it probably will stay for a long, or shorter period of time, stable’. I am very interested in the fact that they are really images in transformation. They're all the time transforming, becoming other things. And that gives, uh, allows us to think of the person I don't know, in a very different way, in relation to our modern colonial understanding, no?

You usually think that there is a subject, and there is an object out there, and we can possess and understand the objects. And it is us who have the agency. But here, those images, the images of the dreaming substance, they are the ones who hound us. They are the ones who appear when we do not expect them, they are the ones really obsessing us, making us do things. I came to think of this dreaming substance more like a kind of ocean, a kind of dense environment. I don't know, like yeah, water, whatever. That surrounds us all the time. And that we are breathing in the sense, I thought like as it's like, dreaming is something similar, like breathing. It is so…we don't control it, it controls us, so to say. Meaning that then, it's not that you are projecting your dreams, or preparing for dreaming this or that, but rather this dreaming substance is dreaming through you, or through all of us in an uncontrolled way, as we breathe.

ANDREA:

Thisis quite close to how we came into the working with dreams. I think it really comes from working with what is the status of the image. And what is the materiality of the image? And so, we were working already a lot, kind of, what is the difference between physical, so physical world, or we call material world, let's say, and the virtual space. So, what is the difference in materiality? Like it can be also like, you know, when we watch a movie, some research has been done to demonstrate that the neurological processes that are happening in us, are the same as when we are actually in a situation, only less intense. So, you know how we, whatever…. And that's just watching something, you know? And then, so we are interested in maybe, what is the difference between that. And then the third materiality we are interested in, is really this dream image. And it can be a nighttime dream. And it was, more for us, more we could, through nighttime dreams, study better. But it's also other images that appear to us. You know, every time, when we are talking about things, we are constantly producing these images. And we got interested in this difference between imagination, so when you actively imagine something and produce an image through thinking, so that means in a way we are producing something from what we already know, and an image that comes to us, that arises to us surprisingly, and it's not coming from anywhere, you know?

There are techniques, several different techniques, with which you can induce an image. And what if I say a cup, you know? Okay, I will see a certain cup, and you will see a different cup in your image. That's for me, a thinking image. But the image that arrives is, if I tell you, you are there and there in that situation, and what you start producing from there, you know…What kind of imaginary starts coming to you? Which is like a dream. A dream just arrives. And so that's…these images that arrive to us, I think are very surprising and we can actually learn a lot from them by just watching them. And so, that kind of question of the status, the materiality of that, is really interesting.

With the dreams, we started thinking about them as kind of culture archives. Culture archives, in a sense of how Gloria Durán proposes the term. And I like to think about it in that way. So, it means how we internalize the way our various markers, for example, it can be identity markers, your gender, your, I dunno, sexual orientation, age, anything else that is, you know, perceived as identity, external identity. So, how you internalize the way those identity markers are considered in the environment, or in the culture that you live in. So how, and the emphasis on how you internalize it. And I think it's…And then also dreams propose all kinds of very ingenious perceptions and solutions and problems, you know? And very complex problems, in very private ways to the dreamers. But when you really zoom into them, pull on them, they're not upset at all. They're really fascinating, very complex, often paradoxical and layered situation. And when you zoom them out, you understand that it's…Often through one image of you being in a situation, there's several layers, which are already speaking to you. So, it's not esoteric in a sense of New Age esoteric. It's really the images already saying everything. You just need to kind of unpack it and watch it.

And in that sense, I was curious if you would be thinking in that way? Or I dunno, maybe I think in a different way about it. But what would be the difference? Because for me there's a big difference between a memory, or a dream image, or an anticipation, in a sense. Because you were talking about, or let's say images that more haunt us, like hallucinations perhaps, or I dunno if you're even talking about…I dunno if you're busy with all those images, all those kinds of images, like visions, ghosts. I think anticipations, daydreams, memories, to me, they're a very different order because they're coming also from a different time direction. So, from a different source of knowing in a way. I'm curious just how you're thinking about it?

VICTORIA:

Yeah, I thought it would be good to work in such broad terms, in order to be able to embrace the many different practices of different artists that I am very interested in. And that I find they have many things in common. And that otherwise, we would think they are working on very, very different things. Meaning this piece of research Dreaming Communities comes from a very long work on images that I have been developing with my group in the University of Zaragoza for many, many years. But on the other hand, it comes from something we started to notice. I was very intrigued, some years ago, when I was seeing so many practices of very different artists throughout the world, working with telepathy, summoning, ghosts of deceased people, working with dreams, working with visions. Like working, at what we could say, at the fringes of modern colonial body, of modern colonial thinking. And then I thought that, maybe… We edited a journal a couple of years ago, maybe three, that was called Other affectivities, magic, bodies, in which we tried to give a frame to create intelligibility. Or to, yeah, to give a frame, a common frame for all those very different works.

But on the other hand, very, very similar in some respects, I thought that, what I thought my intuition, was that all those works were coming from a deep dissatisfaction with the understanding of the body, as it is understood in the modern colonial tradition, with these capacities and this…no? And that there were many artists trying to get rid of the limitations of this body. Knowing that the body can do many other things that, as we said before, that the modern colonial understanding of the body leaves out, all the whole world of images that are so intense, so relevant, so fundamental. That I think that there were many, many artists trying to get rid of that. And trying out different practices in many, many different directions. But that all of them, they could be related to this dissatisfaction with this corporality, inherited corporality. And that they were testing to be more concrete. I am thinking, for example, of the fabulation of the body that Anne Juren practices with her Fantasmical Anatomies. I am thinking of how the Spanish artist Silvia Zayas is working with inherited memories that pass from, generates from, that it's like images that inhabit the bodies of children, even before they know that these images are shaping their bodies, their fears, their remembrances of inherited trauma. I thought about the Mexican artist, Shaday Larios working with what she calls, uh, if I translate it into English, would be a listenatory of dreams, creating communities to share their dreams in which, for example, very clear violent realities can come up, and then this group organise themselves.

So, I was thinking about, well, many, many people working with remote viewing. I don't know. There are so many people working in many different directions, and I think…But a common feature is all of them have this in common, the dreaming substance, and the dissatisfaction with the inherited corporality in our Western tradition.

TRANSITION SOUND: Wind/Tone

ANDREA:

Yeah. There's this kind of, a strict, I wasn't thinking about it as dissatisfaction, but of inherited corporality. But it's interesting to think about it, because maybe it's kind of, it's this sense of, that there's something basically very wrong. It doesn't match my experience of being alive. This kind of very strict division of, you know, kind of this Newton, well, I would say Newtonian description of the world as objects which are fixed in space and so on, and me as separate from it, you know?

But at the same time, of course, it's not all a big mesh of soup. There are certain definitions. So, I think maybe from my side also, it is really coming from more like, the lived experience is very different. And this is how I started looking through also, what kind of other definitions can you…how can you draw from the will of dreams? But also, maybe the quantum? I've been a quantum fan, of reading about quantum theories, since I'm very, very young. And because I know it's already something that's quite a bit around, and it's also a kind of, also a scientific, let's say, description. Even measurements that we couldn't have imagined 10, even 10 years ago, I think. Which are also confirming some of those perceptions that things are, kind of, basically materialize or actualize through… The word that that I like using, I think I mentioned it just yesterday, but we didn't talk about it, is George Simondon’s transduction. I mean it's a beautiful metaphor for many things. Transaction. Because it's a kind of a process. I'm not sure I can quote it really well, but it's like a process of crystallization. So, it's not like some external force is applied onto something to kind of, create it. But it's like maybe to, like a how, how the structure defines itself from certain potentiality. From energies that are formed around. Something starts and the structure starts materializing. And then every step of materialization, for example of a crystal, formulates the photo development of the structure. So, it's not like medium or message or something like this. It's like they are being, you know, crystallized in a way through this process. And that's, he describes it also on the level of psychic, let's say, of the crystallization of individuality. How we experience this. So, it can be applied to that. But really, through the process of crystallization and even how we, through technological, how the technologies impact that. And I think that even though I found out about George Simondon’s work much, much later, it really resonated a lot with what we've been doing. This kind of working between technologies, dreams, and the technological space, dream space, and let's say waking life. Also living in the space-time of capitalism, or capitalist realities. And really working with what that means for us. So somehow this transduction, I probably, yeah, is the term that to me, helped me explain it best. Or something like that. Yeah.

JULIA:

When we work with the bodies in this space that you…the certain rules that we work with is, for example, we don't react, but we respond. So therefore, if certain things are already layered in space, that you take these layers into consideration. From which you start, not acting upon, but acting through. So, you need to take this, whatever is placed, if it's an image or an energy or an action which was localized in that spot, you take that with you. And from that you start building the, whatever you're building or working on. Which I think relates very much to that. And we were also working with different layers of time. So, localizing a narrative from the past, for example, the past of the building or past of-

ANDREA:

-yeah. So, not only dreams, but also really memories.

JULIA:

Yeah. Really like space-time and working with, when does something take place? And that this when, can be many times at once. Which is then also like, if you look at dreams, yeah, in lots we can be a child and an old person at the same time. What you also said with their memories, maybe from fathers and mothers, which we suddenly have. So, this time collapse, which also in quantum mechanics has talked about a lot, even that, if something takes place, at this moment, I may have had that experience already while you just have it, although it's happening at the same time. So, there's that also, I think talks back then to the method of transaction.

VICTORIA:

Mm-hmm. And of course, these methods, they are not methods that you have devised upon and that you apply upon something, but rather that the workings of those dreaming images, they ask you to-

ANDREA:

-they inform you somehow.

VICTORIA:

Yeah. In relation to their dream logics, no? This is a term, I don’t know, if that was one of the words that you would like to bring up?

ANDREA:

It is actually, yeah.

VICTORIA:

But I would like to listen, a little bit, about what do you understand by dream logic?

ANDREA:

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a bit what Julia was now saying. It's two different. Like dream logic is, how we use it, is maybe a contradictory term because it's a dream and logic. We like that a lot because dreams do have a very specific logic, which is a dream logic. It's not a waking logic, but it's still a logic. So, if you take your dream yesterday, do you mind if I take it as an example, please?

VICTORIA:

Of course.

ANDREA:

Okay. If you take your dream yesterday. You know, you come from a small space, side room somewhere where you are picking up your bag, or first you're leaving your bag. Then you're suddenly in this warehouse, you have an encounter with this person who you know from real life. But in the dream, something else happens. Then you go, like, there's a very strong feeling there are explosions. Suddenly, it's not a warehouse anymore, but you can see through the walls. Outside there are nuclear, and other, explosions. But you feel it's beautiful. You know, it's not threatening at all. It's beautiful that all of this is happening. There's an intimate encounter. Then you go back into this small room again because a Panko machine is coming. Which…And a Panko machine is not a breadcrumb machine, but a bulldozer, which is destroying everything. So, you go back to that small room to pick up your bag now. So, it's like you're basically going back into that space, which is kind of small space somewhere in the back. We don't know what it is exactly, but it's a space that you're drawing this bag from. You come back with a bag to the same space, but the space has changed. It's the same space, but now it's…and you, you still say, yes, I'm still in that warehouse. Although, I mean, there's a sense that there are still these lines, but there is nothing of the warehouse left. It's a field, right? When there's earth, there was something about the fertilizer, chemical fertilizer earlier, and then again, the encounter for the second time with the same person, where yet another level of your relationship is revealed in the dream. To which also the space changes. So now, I kind of abstracted it a little bit in the story to talk about what is the dream logic for us. So, as we zoom into these elements, there's a circular going back and forth between the spaces and drawing from somewhere where the whole space changes. But you can also read it symbolically. Not in the sense of what does it mean, you know, any kind of Freudian or other reading, what does it mean to the dreamer? But we, as audience to this dream, understand through the imagery that is produced, a lot about the sensuality in the dream, the eroticism in the dream.

Maybe the earth is wet, you know? Something new is sprouting. But there's chemicals, chemical fertilizers, so it's something you don't want, you know?Because it's a…So, that's what I'm talking about as dream logic. It's not interpreting it to some external book of symbols, which are some kind of authoritarian knowledge, which is telling us this is what these things stand for or represent. No. What are they in these images, not only to the dreamer, but to us, like stepping into it. So, for me, that's the dream logic.

And when you tell this, when, if you walk through the space, for example, we did performances, we always work with the apparatus of the space that we are in. So, we incorporate it. So, we tell or map the dream image, also the virtual image, to include the architectural space into it. So, you're kind of like, in the dream logic. We try to translate the dream logic, let's say, to the everyday space, to the space that you enter. So, you're not imagining it, but you actually read your bodies as an audience stepping into it. And so, we reorganize then, the logic of how the space functions. So that kind of, your gaze, or you need to understand where you are. How does this work, this space at all? And that there is a bit of a confusion. Not a bit, but there is definitely a sense of confusion, or destabilization of like ‘wait, well where am I? Or how does this work?’. So, then we kind of insist on both happening at the same time. Both in the dream logic, but it's mapped into the space here, and then we can also incorporate and layer other narratives. So, it's like you kind of butter, you put bread and butter, and I don't know, cheese or other layers onto it, kind of. That's how I think about how we are layering different spaces and times on top of each other. So, when you place them into the space and we can all perceive them, or we know that they're all called into this space, then they start interacting with each other, you know?

And then we can start navigating them, playing them, and let this dream logic infuse, let's say. The logic of the space here and now. And then you can start navigating it, changing something in that space of the dream. Or in that space of the here and now. There's a different kind of sense of agency of what you can do so you're not stuck in it. That's kind of the dream logic, how we talk about it, and how we work with it, let's say a bit. So not as dream logic, as flashes of images, random flashes of images, let's say, that are like Jabberwocky. And that often described in, in a way, which is anecdotal. There's nothing wrong with an anecdote. Anecdote can be great for many things, but dreams are not just anecdotes. There's something to…there are logics in that sense that, that it's really interesting to try to document it, to try to understand it, to place it here. And I have not yet seen a situation where people watching it haven't said ‘yeah, there's something in this’. Like, you know, you kind of identify, you understand something about it. Um, maybe not intuitively even your mind understands something about it, you know, why it's meaningful.

JULIA:

Yeah. There's something about spatial logic in dreams. Which, so…because we're…I have the feeling, often referred to actions or something like, what is happening rather than the shapes we're in. If there are buildings or open spaces. But they mean something. And then also how they react in dreams. That's beautiful because they can react. They can transform. And any form in which we inhabit, contains also a certain feeling in the history. And like, in performances we use this, and transpose it onto, let's say the theatre apparatus, that at some point in one performance, for example, we just changed the status of the theatre space where we're in, into an escape room.

ANDREA:

Yeah.

JULIA:

So therefore, if we say-

ANDREA:

-Now it's not a theatre, it's an escape room now, you see.

JULIA:

Yeah. But then, everything what we look at, our gaze changes towards the outside, because now you look at the space as a riddle. And anything what you could count, or see, could give you a clue of how to get out of this space.

ANDREA:

I wanna credit here Billy Mullaney, who is working with us, who is not here right now, but he's working with us as a collaborator quite closely. And kind of, he brought in this escape room gaze, let's say. What if you look at every.. So we work with like, what if you look at everything as though it's a dream. Or what if we look at this space as though it's a different space. And then he's been also working with, what if we look at it as an escape room, which we thought. So that's kind of an example of how we layer these different realities into this one here.

JULIA:

Yeah. And how we work with gameplay.

ANDREA:

Yeah.

VICTORIA:

Another of the realities, you also, not that that also intersects with this whole research on dreams, it's also, at least in the performances I have seen, that you are supposedly working for the Premonitions agency in the UK. So could you explain a little bit, because this is, this is quite singular. I think also in relation, not only to this particular fiction, but the particular way in which you’re working. What you call ‘Specufiction’. Which I think it's quite thrilling and interesting also the way you're framing that.

ANDREA:

Yeah. So, for us it's really important that these things that we are talking about, this is a practice. But for us it's important to find performative situations, let's say, which are playful for the audience. So, we are not…So, that to enter this practice from the place of play, let's say from the place of ‘Oh, we can just do as if.’ You know? Which is, I guess, what theatre is. But because we are also interested in expanding the idea, where is the stage? So, there's an inner stage, there's a stage, you know, on stage, but there's also the stage. We collaborate with the moon and the night sky a lot, you know? Where something real happens there. So, with the weather also, which is incorporated then, into either our installation or the performance.

But here we started this collaboration with the specufictional, that's the word I wanna propose as one of my words. Specufictional Premonitions Agency. And the Premonitions agency, is a government funded agency, whose task is to collect and analyse citizens' dreams and develop methods of intervening into these dreams, in order to affect waking life, or let's say real world events. And even though this agency is specufictional, we work with it and treat it as real. And we are developing its methodologies and departments, you know, from collecting department selections, department capturing, department materialization, department analysis, department, and so on. So secondly, the institution is, we are creating it, but it's also, we are working with it. And it's informing us. But it has its body.

Actually, Julia brought it up somehow. We were talking about how can we work with a conceptual framework, which is not about dreams, you know, but it is conceptual. Frameworks are really important to us, always. How we conceptualize the work that it, is in itself, an image, in a way, or a frame that you can enter the concept. So, Julia brought up this reference to the Premonitions Bureau, which really existed actually in Britain in the sixties. And it was set up because of a big earthquake that happened. And it was a very unfortunate event where a school was also hit, and a lot of children were killed. And then it transpired later that a lot of these children especially, had some kind of premonition dreams about this event happening. And then these two guys set up a bureau which would collect, really, people's dreams. And really tried to predict future catastrophic, in order to avert them. But then the whole book came out from it, about the direction of time. So, we got interested, not so much to kind of continue with this idea of predicting future events, or preventing future catastrophes, although we've worked with that in our previous projects, this whole idea of catastrophe, this kind of continuous reproduction of, of the state of crisis and the state of imminent catastrophes. So, we cannot deal with anything really. We are immobilized. So, what if we kind of create a specufictional. Because we are also government funded, because we get, you know, part of a large part of our subsidies comes from funding bodies. So, it's not invented, it's a specufiction.

But we are talking about what is the metaphysics, you know, of the agency towards the dreams. Where do these dreams come from? You know, how does it work? What is a premonition for it? So together with the agency, we think of dreams of premonitions, not as predictions of future events, but as a feeling or as a sense of something happening, sometime, or somewhere else, but the time-direction is not always clear. So, it can be coming from the future. It could be coming from the past or also from the present. Because in the dream and quantum logic, they all kind of coexist on a kind of a spiral in our mind. You know, when you map them, you can move across. So that's kind of how we work with them. That means that when you're working, when you're intervening into dreams with this agency, when you go into a person's dream and you make a step, you navigate through it, or you overlap several of the dreams to create a kind of communal map of dreams, you are actually affecting things in real life.

TRANSITION SOUNDS: The Cube

ANDREA:

I was curious also to ask you a bit about, because you're working with this futurity of the, lemme see, not, maybe that's not the, I'm not sure how you're calling it, but I was curious about your practice of working with the imagining the future. The prophecy. I think.

VICTORIA:

The prophecy, right!

ANDREA:

Yeah. You were mentioning in that sense. So maybe it's probably very different, but yeah.

VICTORIA:

Yeah, this is one of the practices I'm developing now. It's a writing practice. It's centred around the rhetorics of dreams. That is because it's about inhabiting the very fertile and interesting space that is between the experience of the dream, which is an immersive, total phenomenological experience. With that you live in a, as we have been already saying, in a time that is not chronological. And in a space that is not Euclidean. So…and how this very complex experience is translated into a verbal account. So, I think in this gap, it's a wonderful space for working and I have been reading, very interesting, also anthropological texts, about how in different cultures there are very particular rhetorics of dreams that signal a very particular ontology of another understanding of the body.

For example, I was telling you yesterday about in the Tzeltal culture in Mexico, it seems that the person telling the dream oscillates all the time between the I, the me, my experience, and like being a kind of second person who is told what happened in the dream. That, of course, responds to an ontology in which the person is divided into three elements. On the one hand you have your body, physical body with your skin here, and now you have your image/soul that travels into the dream world. And you have also your nagual, which is related to the animal that is, with which you are connected in, when you're born. So, when they tell about the dreams, it's always related to, “I have been told” and she says, “but I experienced”. They are always shifting between, “apparently it happened that, but also I experienced, so it is…” And then I thought that maybe by intervening in the way we talk about dreams in these rhetorics, we could also change our understanding of ourselves and, and our body. As I told you before, I am interested really in how the dreaming substance can change the whole ontology. It also is super important how it can change our understanding of ourselves as subjects in this world, and our bodies, and our presences and so on. So,, I thought, right, that's maybe changing how we write, or how we tell about that would be important.

And then I got an invitation by an artist group in Spain, that they are…it's called the group Endangered Species, that are working particularly with the sustainability of performing arts practices, with the sustainability also of their own lives, not with the precarity in the sector of performing arts. And they hosted now, a three day seminar encounter on futures. And they invited me with this research of Dreaming Communities to think about futures. And there…So, I proposed a practice that was where I was developing it more clearly, that departs from three premises. On the one hand, the body is always dreaming. The second premise would be every dream is an image of the future - of course, it's always a collage, it's always a collage of images, as you said, in relation to quantum physics. They are images from everywhere. From imagined futures, from feared futures, but also from past experiences. The body is all the time thinking through those images, how to function in life with new experiences, new schemes of life, new situations. So, it's always dealing, always thinking with images from, from all. And then in this sense that as it is always thinking, it is always proposing images of the future. Trying to, to get ahead. And then also the other premise was that the body is not mine. So, meaning that if my body's always thinking, it doesn't mean that I am the one thinking, as I said before, my body is really permeated and it’s always collective. So, departing from that, what I proposed to this group was that they write down the dreams of these nights and then we would do several operations to transform them into prophecies. The most relevant, strong one was to transform the account of the dream from the past tense to the future tense. And then it really worked as a prophecy. And then we were also proposing integrating different dreams into one narrative. And, well, there were many different things, but this is actually what I am working on that I am super excited – finding what does this future tense create - it is fantastic.

ANDREA:

I mean, it's really interesting because we've been working with it in the present. So, we always, when we work with a dream, we tell it like, it's not like “I remember I was there”, like with how we normally tell dreams, but it's like “I'm here standing in this hallway. It's quite narrow and long and it's dark. I can see a bit of like this red, reddish dirty old carpet and it's light. I don't see where the source of light. There's…it's daylight, but there's no windows”… and so on. So, it's like in the now, and which already materializes, I think, into the here and now. So, I'm very curious how to work, how it works into the future, but it's also a bit of a - since we talked about gameplay, and one of our…so, we work across this dream gameplay and quantum logics, let's say - it is a kind of a gameplay to do that. Also I think what you're doing. Because we - to link it to this specufictional proposal - it is for us a play with the audience, a gameplay with as a conceptual gameplay also, but like a real to say, okay, here we are working with the agency and the agency. So, you are not responsible for the dreams that you're receiving. You're filtering them on the dreamer. It is not the dreamers, the, it's not you producing, you're just receiving these images. So, it's our work to separate the dream from the dreamer’s subjectivity. If you have a specufictional framework like this, it also gives you, literally, agency. And it also, you are somehow taken a bit more seriously by people, which is what people tell us. So, it's not like, “oh, some artist, you know, doing something with dreams”. But it's like, “oh, so it's a, it's a government funded agency who's doing this work” and you know. But it, in terms of futurity of what it, I think it's what you're doing, what you're describing as doing is kind of saying, “okay, what is the difference between me saying, I'm standing in this hallway and I'm feeling stressed because I need to open the door and I know my whole family, I'm feeling stressed because I know my whole family is there behind the door and it's a big family reunion and I'm late for the prayer…” And what if I say this in the future, you know? So, it's, I'm not sure, it's very creepy and freaky, you know – “I'm, I will be standing in this hallway, and I will be late again, you know, for the prayer and my whole family is in there…” and so on. So, it's interesting because I think if you shift it to the future in the right now, you are already creating this future of course. And there's a lot of conversation about, now, about the future being created now, right? So, but that also means in that sense, we are interested in how can this specufictional gameplay, let's say mode, modus operandi, let's say, or procedure - because it's very procedural in a way, the creation of the reality, let's say. So how can it be some kind of a playful tool, and light tool and easy tool? Not to talk about it, but like to have a sense that you can move and something we, we learned working with Mala a lot with the dreams is that, I mean, maybe that I surfaced to myself, is that when you get stuck in a dream, so, when you're like, actually the feeling of some kind of nightmare, this frozen images of being frozen or being unable to act, for example, which I think we've all had in somehow in the dream where you cannot act, you are being chased and you cannot move or something like this. It's often when the image gets frozen, stuck. And when you move the image and you can have a tool to do that, you just get the image to move. Maybe it gets worse, but at least it's moving, you know? And when it's moving, something can happen. And so I'm thinking about it like that, you know, with the specufictional that you have like some kind of, with this gameplay approach, that you can actually, if you can do it with a nighttime dream, you should be able to do that with whatever situation if you set it up in the performative or installed environment - because we work with both - as a kind of a fluid situation. So, it's like you can practice doing something, you know, and, and it's not to improve it or to repair it or to make it better but to even move it.

VICTORIA:

In relation to this, also, one of the premises, or one of the conceptual basis of this exercise was to think that these images of the future, although we call them prophecies, because they're rhetoric, it makes them sound like this, they are not things that are going to happen, but they are rather an image of the future that makes you act. And of course it is related, as you say, to gameplay and, and yeah, working playfully because it triggers imagination and we are freer to work.

JULIA:

In both cases you create, actually, agency for yourself. There is the ability to move and to shift and to transform, to prepare, plus to practice. Also, when we practice it or it's both a practice and if the practice starts inhabiting the body, you know, it becomes a habit of, so therefore, yeah, the agency also becomes part of the body. Which I think is very interesting because you can act.

VICTORIA:

It actually gives us a sense, as you say, of how imagination can help us. So, how these games with dreams that we are all developing, and many other artists, can help us with this difficulty, nowadays, to see a future. To conceive a future. Working with these images of the dreaming substance we are able to see how imagination is very malleable. How the images of the future that we are handling, that we are working with there, that, that we have received or they have been imposed upon our minds, as you were saying, Andrea, yesterday - they are not the only ones we can see. Through our dreams, through our visions, through our work with the dreaming substance, we are able, really, to see that the future is malleable. That we can try this way or this way out. Or to try different, first of all, giving in to these future images and then realizing, as in dreams, that they are, that you can shift this, that you can try out to change things. It really gives us a sense of agency that I think is most urgent today.

ANDREA:

I think so too. In today, I think we really need it because the images have become so overwhelming and because we live in the global…at the time of globalism, so like capitalism that has spread all over the world, but we also get news of everything going everywhere. And of course, climate disasters, all of this, not to deny them at all - on the contrary, they are real threats, but the ways of engaging with them and dealing and reorganising and starting up different initiatives and developing different kinds of ways of living. They exist and they're just not presented in images. But we are constantly just repeating the images of catastrophes to ourselves and disasters. But there are other images and there are other ways of functioning that we do have, even if they are small. And I could go into what I think can work, but it's more about how to even get out of that mode and start producing also those images. And a lot of them will fail, but that's fine, you know? Because then you will at least be moving and doing those things. And we can also see that things that can move pretty fast. So I'm curious, not only how can we prepare, you know, for catastrophes, but how can we practice being active agents in the world, and how can we draw from these practices. Also, apply knowledges or not apply maybe but use knowledges from different domains.

So for us, we really work interdisciplinary, or we call it now transdisciplinary, but actually the best word is indisciplinary, which for me means - I borrowed this term from Ranciere when he was here at the Maagdenhuis setting. When the students took over the Maagdenhuis, it was a protest, education of students against, you know, the situation at the time. And he came to talk to them and he used the word indisciplinary saying basically arts education, or any education should even not follow disciplines. It should be, you know, the knowledges that are produced, the thoughts should start forming new disciplines, new ways of working. That's kind of how we are thinking.

And for me, the question of future, of course, every future - maybe now I'm talking a lot - but I just wanna propose this image of the Lunar Spaceship City that we are working with now. Because it is talking about the role of fictions or like, let's say I'm personally thinking about, or, we are thinking together, both Julia and me, I think we agreed on it, that we are thinking as a choreographic approach to narrative. What can be a choreographic approach to narrative and choreographic approach to space time, you know? So, things that we learned by being choreographers, artists, working with space. Julia comes from visual arts, but really thinking very choreographically. I think through space actually. How can you, how can we apply or use those knowledges that, you know, working with a group of people making performances as well. We've learned a lot about how, you know, all of this comes from that really. So,...But I've been always thinking, how do you apply this kind of choreographic tools to formulations of narratives or narrative structures also? So stories also. But really narratives. So that's kind of how we think also about dream narratives or others, but also about how can you apply it to fictions. And how can you borrow images that are already around, maybe in the past as references, but like reactivate them or transform them or update them, let's say, into new images. So now we are working with the Agency. So the Agency has, you know, has also an analysis and an investigations department. So we'll do a lot of dream investigation also to separate the dream from the dreamer's subjectivity and analysis.

JULIA:

We also, looking at the references with - and references not only in symbolic or historic matter, but also materials - like looking at, 'okay, if I look at this cup, how was this cup made? What were the processes? What is the materiality? The cup - where was it produced?' Looking. But then looking at the real-world locations, and what is happening there, and sort of connecting these two worlds with each other.

ANDREA:

And so these are the different departments of the Premonitions Agency, so these different activities. But we started working with Dream Transplanting, which is a fascinating procedure - I think - we just started it! But basically it's about how to transplant my dream onto you and Julia now. And each of you are going to import it. So you know, into your own sense of life that you, you know, you are moving through and what happens to that dream? Are you gonna accept it or reject it? Or are you gonna mutate it? And so on. So it's a very interesting process because it, you know, brings out a lot of...

So, we are working with the image from Superstudio, which is a conceptual architects, I would say group, Italian group, from I think late sixties, seventies maybe? Who devised a number of very beautiful architectural impossible concepts, and all kind of dystopian/utopian concepts of cities, future cities. And there's a book which they, and we've worked already with some of their structures as references, but for this project we are working with their 12 Cautionary Tales for Christmas, where they have twelve short descriptions, images of kind of cities. And the fourth city is a city, which is a text, is a city with a large red wheeled spaceship, which is traveling through outer space endlessly, with eighty sleepers on it. Forty, I think, are male and forty female, and sleeping eternally and eternally procreating through a set of mechanical uteruses. So, you know, they're just, the bodies are sleeping and endlessly traveling through space. And they contextualize this as a city. So, it's a kind of a very dystopian and very also seventies or like 1970s image of the world. And I think, so we kind of took that image, kind of, working, updating it, let's say, to our time, to our lives. So we are working with the concept that the agency is connected to that. So, there's these travellers, eighty of them traveling endlessly through outer space. And we are, the agency is collecting live, collecting dreams from people on Earth live and transplanting them into those sleepers, live also. So, we are really interested in this concept and fiction of what does it mean to, for somebody who doesn't have, who has for maybe for generation just been traveling and sleeping and dreaming. And I think in the original, they're all processing one dream. Just having one dream in a loop, which I find that a very scary and obviously brilliant idea. It's torture, yes! But we kind of changed it to, so we are transplanting these dreams onto them, but we are weaving several dreams and because we've been working with weaving dreams in all of our projects, we, we've basically always at least two dreams of the dreamers. So each dreamer is, sees everything.

It's the same question about the future, you know, because it is impossible to think utopias. We nowadays, if you think utopia, you just create it into a dystopia immediately. So how do you actually transport actual, you know, what do you transplant situations, paradoxes, complexities? And how do you transplant complexities that that constitute life in kind of miniature form of one dream, one private small thing that we can observe? And it's of course, hilarious to do that, but it's also very insightful and the conceptual gesture because then on stage you are watching this procedure, but at the same time there is this narrative, which of course speaks to it. So in that sense, we are weaving those. And so each dreamer is always, sees everything around them as part of their dream. And there are two at least dreamers. So one goes and says, “I'm here” and the other one goes, “I'm, I'm here, I'm in the dark room, and I'm here in my studio and I'm here in the, you know, and then I'm here in the, in Floris’s music studio and he just, you know, renovated it” and so on. So that's how we bring different levels together and the audience, and then we start overlapping them. So, we start finding connections between them and by finding overlaps or where they're similar, that's how we start, kind of, we are weaving it in the now, let's say.

VICTORIA:

It goes back to something we were also commenting yesterday on, about how between one body and the other, there are like - what we call usually in dance copying a movement is something that is totally filled with thousands of operations of the imagination of projecting and receiving images, and so on. In relation to be able to, yeah, to do something like we say, copy a movement, which is…and in this case, it's not even copy a movement, but embodying a dream. I think it's super interesting!

MARTIN:
Thank you, Victoria, Julia, and Andrea, for this conversation. For the transcript of this episode and resources mentioned in the conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool.com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you're listening right now.

This series is a Rose Choreographic school production, produced and edited by Hester Cant, curated by Victoria Perez Royo with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Bibliography:

People:

Anne Juren

Billy Mullaney

Endangered Species - group

Gloria Durán

Jacques Ranciere

Mala Kline

Shaday Larios

Silvia Zayas

Work:

The Cube - TILT