An Underworld Journey into 'Sleep No More'

Seperation/Displacement

Punchdrunk’s whole goal, as I ascertained, was to take the viewer and fully submerge them into a world of his creation. He and his cast and crew wanted the views to totally forget the world of 27th East Street in Manhattan and become indefinitely engrossed in their modge-podge of a universe. It was a collage of Shakespeare and film noir and horror films and murder and passion, and like all abstract works of art do, it disorients us completely. However, the glorious creation of confusion manifests an other-worldness beyond our imaginations. There are countless moments where you can point to that illustrates this idea. From the moment you become a part of the experience, you enter an elevator, and everyone is shuffled onto unknown floors. It’s like your being delivered through a dumbwaiter, to the chopping block, where the play is ready to devour you. As you are julienned into bits of the plot, you begin to cook up your own secret recipe, your own private world, out of the secret ingredient basket that the actors, setting, and scenes cook up for you. Retrospectively, I realize that it is truly impossible to pinpoint anything about the experience. It is not quite Shakespeare, but not quite Hitchcock; it is not quite 1930’s, but not quite medieval. The experience’s disconnection and non-commitment to any one idea is what makes Sleep No More a wonderfully new creation. 
          I think what the show has taught me about underworld journeys is that they experience you. Even if the purpose of the quest is to find your own will (like in Dante’s Inferno), the hells chew you up, spit you out, and now you know how to dodge the jaws of death like a champ. The underworld journey is meant to swallow the traveler, so that they never know when they will see the light of day. She/he is meant to be separated from their familiarity, to be displaced into a world that they could never imagine. They will learn of all the icky insides and once they are expelled back into reality, they will come out almost anew. I know when I found my way out the deep bowls of the McKittrick, I loved the smell of the cold fresh air and made my way back home to dream again of the dances and mayhem, and tried to decipher what they meant.          
 

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