The Glow

Dreams are perhaps one of the original sites of artistic speculation. Like art-works themselves, they hold a mirror up to life, projecting our hidden desires, wants, needs, and compulsions. This makes them a rare site of speculation on authentic truth - insistently unreal, and yet somehow, in that very unreality, revealing of a deeper, otherwise inaccessible reality.

And yet, our conception of dreaming seems to have changed recently. A choir of Big Tech and political interest - having mined our material world to its current limits - turns increasingly to our fantasies as sites of new territorial invasion - our dreams are harvested for their revealing of desires to be relentless deployed in marketing, with individuals acting them out for us in real-time as agents for the objectives of exploitative corporate interest, and self-regulation posing as a solution to problems caused by an increasingly destructive context. In a world of exponential powerlessness, our dreams turn to fantasies of domination and control - fulfilled by apps that measure our brainwaves, streamline our yoga, deliver our sex on-demand, and open the door for AI to occupy the place where human imagination once steadfastly stood.

In a context relatively hostile for dreaming as a human practice, The Glow (Das Leuchten), a new work from Cologne-based SEE! Kollectiv, is refreshingly old-school in its approach to dreaming. Principally a choreographic collaboration from SE Struck, Alexandra Knieps with performance duo Anja Müller and Clara Marie Müller, the piece features live sound composition from Maria Wildeis, who sits on-stage with the sound desk and reacts to the performers gestures. It's bare and stripped-back, with long periods of silence interrupted by interventions that sit on an abject plane, not quite announcing themselves, our attention sitting constantly in the realm of subconscious white noise. 

As it's a dream, The Glow drifts between spaces: German and English languages, theatrical gesture and flowing rhythms of dance, woven together with fragments of historical texts from authors such as Walter Benjamin and Lina Bo Bardi, combined with those of the collaborators. The piece opens with a lazy pulse of light, the soundtrack beginning its wander into the main premise, as though entering sleep. From this space, a dancer (Anja Müller) emerges, their movement bare and empty as the liminal space around them. The first words are pronounced: "I was dreaming of a crash. A frontal, head-on collision. Und überall ein weißes Licht, und das war das Ende." ("and everywhere a white light, and that was the end"). The text begins a symbolic death, a metaphorical killing of the earthly state so that dreams may enter, as the second dancer (Clara Marie Müller) enters and begins to shadow the first in diagonal, somewhat aimless walks across the stage space, eventually exploding into an asymmetrical partnership that fragments and reassembles itself before the audience.

 

Photo: Dieter Hartwig

Things evolve when the partners acknowledge each other for the first time, the soundtrack inserting droplets as though in an atmosphere of dormant dwelling. As with Buñuel and Dali's dreamy Un Chien Andalou, the animal world is a key part of Glow, with cats and dogs especially intruding, almost unwanted, into the stage space. Ambiguities abound before an audience drifting in and out of attention: "my mother becomes my father", and categories collapse in pleasingly banal ways. Sounds and lights (Fabian Eichner) exist in a space of not-quite-interaction, as dialogue partners that continually miss each other in soft touches and blurred interactions to an increasingly club-like techno space, while the cloudy ceiling curtain (set: Isabelle Marie Lange) drops slowly for the finale.

As a perpetually uncontrollable feature of the subconscious, dreams are one of humanity's ultimate sites of the unknown. One of the key achievements of Glow is to render this space unknowable again, to wake up an audience and in doing so, restore a sense of the mystery and power of dreams, in a context of forces hell-bent on removing it. Through the silence of what is not shown, it opens a space with a rare chance to think again about freedoms which have been - almost-imperceptibly - taken from us.

Das Leuchten / The Glow

Ballhaus Ost

Concept, direction, choreography
SE Struck, Alexandra Knieps

Choreography, performance
Anja Müller, Clara Marie Müller

Composition/ Live-Sound
Maria Wildeis

Scenography, costumes
Isabelle Marie Lange

Outside Eye
Johanna-Yasirra Kluhs

Assistence
Lisa James

Light
Fabian Eichner

production + press apricot productions (berlin) transmission (cologne)