In Francisco de Goya’s famous print “The sleep of reason produces monsters” (1797) we see Goya asleep on his desk surrounded by creatures of the night: owls, cats, and bats. The backside of the engraving reads “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with reason, fantasy is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.” A century later, in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published, and it took precisely one hundred more years for the human world to broadcast Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in 1997, on TV.

In THE SLEEP OF REASON, vampires speak for themselves and look at our world from their perspective, playing with the superstitions and clichés surrounding them. This work proposes an appropriation of reason by the world of the undead. If humans have stopped believing in vampires, do they still believe in the magic of theater? Can the stage maintain its magical potential when all the tricks are on display?

Choreography, Performance Cécile Bally
Performance  Julia Plawgo, Louise Trueheart
Light Design Sandra Blatterer
Scenography Cécile Bally, Sandra Blatterer, Alexandre Viard 
Costum Louise Trueheart, Cécile Bally
Outside eye Antonia Baehr, Asaf Aharonson
Special thanks for their guest appearance to Liselotte Singer, Martin Hansen and Asaf Aharonson
In co-production with the SOPHIENSÆLE
Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
With the support of HZT Berlin.

↦ REVIEW

An rasselnden Ketten hängt Cécile Bally, durstig, furchtlos, angetreten, mit ihren Gehilfinnen ein rosarotes Kunstblutbad zu veranstalten, die Unsterblichkeit zu feiern, jahrhundertjährige Vampir*-Klischees abzuschütteln und Goyas Ungeheuer aus dem „Schlaf der Vernunft“ auf die Gegenwart loszulassen. Das ist der wache Traum von der Wollust am Theater, das seinen Schauer/Zauberwitz dadurch gewinnt, dass die Farbpatronen vom halb-halb-sichtbaren Techniker abgefeuert werden, die Vampirin Kreuze aus Holzpfählen zimmert und sich ihren schlimmsten Albträumen stellt. Vampirin neben Nicht-Vampirin, neben Baby-Vampirin, neben Dinosaurier-Vampir, neben Knoblauchgirlanden. Sound im bunten Dunkelreich liefert Katy Perry: We can dance, until we die, you and I will be young forever. Sorry, Dracula, das war’s dann mit Patriarchat