What do you dream about? Will you tell us? The Human Dream Project Hotline is run by artist Admiral Grey. Individuals call in to have their dreams recorded and collected. This accumulation is expressed as “becoming an international archive of human dreams from our time”.
Snake in the Boot is an experimental theater collective helmed by Mr. Grey, Chad Raines and Brandt Adams. They “create works that lie at the intersection of artifice and truth, poetical expressions that allow us to explore our messy prosaic realities”. Their production just began a month long run at the off-off Broadway arts incubator The Tank.
Recordings were selected of humans describing dreams they have had. The team illustrates these tales onstage using movement and puppetry, accompanied by a musical soundtrack and live percussion. A boatload of visual enchantments will appear.
A narrator puppet of sorts (pictured above) literally kicks things off. Other than playing the recorded dreams, there is no real dialogue employed by the performers. The puppets are varied, colorful, interesting, often abstract and generally lean more towards cute than scary. There is a lot of sensory creativity and amusing movement on display.
The high point comes early on. A woman dreams she is sitting at a window seat on a plane. Peering outside she notices a biplane is flying erratically nearby. A woman is standing on the upper wing. She looks like a “bad ass French movie star”. Blindfolded and smoking a cigarette the woman is certainly facing her doom as the plane is on fire.
Staging this dream includes puppets sitting in modern day airplane seats. A sizable red biplane hovers with a woman standing on the wing. A life sized version of her is reenacted on the floor for additional close up and emphasis. The imagery perfectly embodies the dream recording being spoken aloud.
How does this particular dream end? With the realization that “I’ll never be as free as that woman”. Not a dream about a witnessed horror as much as a dream about one’s inability to face life head on, fear be damned. If all of the dream recordings had such an arc followed by a thought provoking ending, this collection could be masterful.
Many of the dreams are more meandering affairs as befit the nature of such musings. A mother is a memorable red brick colored windmill. One attends a formal event in a big mansion and is “out of my league”. Her father will enter the story and who he is garners big laughs.
Another chucklesome entry is from the person who dreams that their teeth are loose and then falling out. In different ways and patterns every time. Reassembly is not ideally realized. Here is one of many examples where the live percussion is cleverly used to supplement visual gags.
Many of the segments end with a whimper rather than a bang. Think Saturday Night Live skit where you are enjoying the ride but it’s time to move on to the next skit. There is a lot of potential in this idea and it will be fun to see where this team takes this work next. In the meantime, observe the purple octopus’ tentacle dance. Decide if you should take a video with your phone or be alive in the moment watching the bizarre occurrence as it happens (another dream which considers a meaningful question).
At the end of this performance a woman turned to her companion and loudly exclaimed “I have a million questions”. We all laughed. According to the program the Human Dream Project is currently developing phone booth installations to be placed around the world for further collection. Perhaps the next show will elicit a billion questions.
The Human Dream Project is running at The Tank through April 28, 2024.