The warehouse has been transformed into the ‘McKittrick Hotel,’ (a reference to Hitchcock’s Vertigo) complete with a fictional history that is outlined on the website. The piece is staged in a non-theater space–in this case, across six floors of warehouse on West 27th Street. Sleep No More follows a formula that Punchdrunk has perfected over the course of many shows. The Donkey Show was conceived of by Randy Weiner, a playwright and Paulus’s husband who is one-third of EMURSIVE, the production company responsible for the commercial run of Sleep No More in New York. The show that launched her career was The Donkey Show, a roller-rink version of Midsummer Night’s Dream staged in a downtown nightclub. Paulus’ career has been built on that is innovative and ‘edgy’ (often experimenting with re-configurations of the audience/performance relationship), while still maintaining commercial appeal. Sleep No More was created by the company in 2003, and restaged in Boston 2009 at ART, where Diane Paulus had taken over as artistic director. Punchdrunk’s work adds live performers to these “immersive” installations. Understood as part of this genealogy, Punchdrunk’s current New York hit Sleep No More points to a potentially troubling way that this spectator-performer relationship is being reconfigured for our consumption-obsessed time.Īccording to Sleep No More‘s website, “Since 2000 Punchdrunk have pioneered a game changing form of immersive theater in which roaming audiences experience epic storytelling inside sensory theatrical worlds.” Punchdrunk seems to have sprung from a particular art-world trend of the same time: Christopher Buchel, the Swiss artist who creates site-specific immersive pieces where audience members hunt for clues inside hyper-realist film-style sets, had been making work since the 1990s in 2001 Mike Nelson, a British artist who works with site specific installations, was nominated for the Turner Prize that same year GregorScheider won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his work Totes Haus u r, an installation of a house with moving walls and hidden rooms that the audience could explore. And in New York the idealism of the late Sixties set the scene for companies like the Living Theater and the Performance Group, who, with Dionysus in 69, created the granddaddy of Punchdrunk’s“immersive” form. Augusto Boal took this active engagement a step further in his Forum Theater, created in Brazil under military rule, inviting the audience to step inside the piece and alter the situations it portrayed. Brecht’s Epic Theater reframed the relationship for his ideal audience of active citizens willing to change society. There is a long history of experimentation with that relationship, and developments are often co-incident with challenges to, or re-imaginings of, political and societal systems. The performer playing Lady M broke character, screamed, and a group of black-masked crew materialized to escort the spectator from the show.Įvery piece of performance, whether intentionally or not, creates its own model for the relationship between the spectator and the performer. When Lady M rose from the bath naked, wet and shivering, and stretched out her arms, the audience member, confused, returned the gesture and moved to embrace her. One evening a few weeks ago, an audience member didn’t understand the cue.

After the bath she stands up in the tub and raises her arms towards the audience gathered around her, inviting them to pass her a robe.

There is a scene in Sleep No More when the mad Lady Macbeth takes a bath to try and wash Duncan’s blood from her hands. From Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” in NYC.

Sleep no more one on ones