Sleeping Beauties Chasing Ghosts

Kosmas Kosmopoulos | Luna Park 31 Mar-02 Apr 2019 | UFER_STUDIOS (Studio 14) | Berlin

In SLEEPING BEAUTIES – CHASING GHOSTS six performers go on a hunt for their own dreams and those of the others. On their way through the darkness they encounter all kinds of ghosts, some of them irritatingly strange and some strangely familiar. They give them body and voice, and it can happen that the boundary between dream and reality suddenly has no meaning any longer. Will they awaken from their Sleeping Beauty slumber, and will the world then perhaps be a different place, no longer darkened by the shadow of our wars?

We spend a third of our lifetime asleep. Science still cannot fully explain why. Why we dream while we sleep is also not clear. What is certain is only that dreams refer to what we have experienced while awake, and Sigmund Freud believed that dreams reveal repressed emotions, aggressions and desires as the “royal road to the unconscious”. In any case, dreams are states of consciousness often perceived as tremendously intense. Thus, some dreams remain with us long after we wake up, they are not only a reflection of the reality we experience while awake, dreams themselves often have a great influence on our thoughts, feelings and actions. The examination of this influence and of different interpretations of sleep and dreams is the basis for the development of the dance performance SLEEPING BEAUTIES – CHASING GHOSTS.

In an open rehearsal process, children from the Gesundbrunnen Elementary School and surrounding daycare centers helped to find answers to questions about this, questions such as: How do sleep and dreams become visible in awake life, and how do they move our bodies? And how does reality enter our dreams? Why can we sometimes dream with our eyes open? What kind of ghosts come to us while we are dreaming? Do they continue to accompany us even when we are awake, and how can we interact with them? What did Sleeping Beauty dream about during his hundred-year sleep?

Production:

SLEEPING BEAUTIES – CHASING GHOSTS is a production of Initiative LUNA PARK e.V. and Kosmas Kosmopoulos in cooperation with the Gesundbrunnen Elementary School, funded by TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund (DANCE PACT Local-Regional-National) and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe in the frame of the project „tanz(t)räume“ and by the Minister of State for Culture and Media in the program NEUSTART KULTUR / DIS-TANZ-START of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, supported as part of a two-week EUNIC dance residency at the Goethe Institute in Cairo.

Choreography: Kosmas kosmopoulos

Choreographic assistance: Nikoleta Koutitsa

Performers: Mohamed Moodimbi Ben Salah, Yuri Fortini, Sofia Gousgoula, Maia Joseph, Nikoleta Koutitsa, Davide Lorenzi

Music: Anthony Palaskas

Lighting design: Andreas Harder

Stage design: Yiorgos Karapidakis (YioKa)

Photography & Video documentation: Giovanni Lo Curto

Production management and communication: Fee Josten, Effie Athanasodimitropoulou

Text and dramaturgical advising: Kai Pichmann