"Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground gives way under him, and the dream begins." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Phantasmagoria: Circus of Dreams at The Roundhouse on Jan. 30 and 31 as part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Visit bpaartists.com for details.
"Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground gives way under him, and the dream begins." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Sleep is an evolutionary mystery, a little slice of death, or a visit from a candy-coloured clown they call the Sandman - depending on whether you're a psychiatrist, a poet of the macabre, or a fan of Blue Velvet.
The land of slumber is also the subject of Phantasmagoria: Circus of Dreams, a new show from the Loose Leaf Collective (made up of 23 students in the Bachelor of Performing Arts program currently based at Capilano University) showing this weekend at the Roundhouse Community Arts centre in Yaletown.
The 23-artist troupe gathered around a white board to scrawl out ideas and, like Charles Bukowski, sift through the madness for the word.
Tequila didn't seem like the title of a performance and Fisheye failed to resonate with the group.
But on that crowded whiteboard there were two titles that pulled toward each other like magnetic poles or chocolate and peanut butter: Phantasmagoria and, on the other side of the board, Circus of Dreams.
The notion of a dream as an entity with a perfect logic that unravels in sunlight inspired the group, according to the show's director Jessica Ross.
For Ross, the darker connotations of Phantasmagoria stirred a largely-forgotten terror from her own childhood.
She was in that murky borderland between the end of childhood and the onset of adolescence when the dream began.
"It started as if I was in this Super Mario video game. Perfect grass, perfect little pink flowers, kind of 2D," she recalls. "The tone of the dream was still quite happy."
That was when she would arrive at the base of a looming clock tower. Free from gravity, she started to walk up, up and up the tower until she was at the summit. The two-dimensional world bloomed with breadth and depth as Ross looked into the universe of whirring gears inside the clock.
"I would fall into the clock tower and get grinded up into the gears," she says. "I would wake up crying and I thought I was going to die."
One of the main projection images in Phantasmagoria is a giant clock.
Time runs through the show as the circus moves from one stage of sleep to another.
As director, one of Ross' major contributions was arranging the show around a sleep cycle, which she hopes will bring "overall cohesiveness to all the different numbers."
After choosing the show's theme, Loose Leaf Collective splintered into small groups, each of them producing unique performance pieces.
As the group's director it's up to Ross "to mesh it all together into one, big super dream."
"Director might not even be the right word to call what I'm doing but it's the closest one," she says with a laugh.
Asked how she collaborates with 22 artistic minds and 22 egos, Ross answers with two words: "Very carefully."
The major challenge was learning to speak everyone's artistic language and to apply a traffic light system.
The green light means performances are going well and should fit into the show. The yellow light means some revisions may be necessary and the red light signifies a performance that would work better in a different show.
"Unfortunately we couldn't incorporate all the pieces because we'd have had a three-hour show," Ross explains, discussing the hardship of having to "kill their babies," artistically speaking.
Ross is somewhat elusive in describing the show. Asked what the audience will see when the show starts, she demurs.
"I don't think it'll be quite clear when the show starts," she says.
Discussing the show in its entirety, she remains difficult to pin down.
"You might question whether or not you're a part of the show or you're just an audience member watching a show. The experience is ambiguous."
When discussing how she'd like the audience to respond, Ross imagines someone who's seen the show trying to explain it to a friend, floundering and finally saying: "You know what, you just have to go see it to get it."
She sounds a bit like someone trying to describe a dream.
