Do you ever have this feeling?

Everything has made so much sense, and then, the dawning, niggling sensation at the back of your skull that this isn't quite right, that you'd long finished that exam, that so-and-so doesn't wear such-and-such's face, that one doesn't get to simply walk on the ceiling. And like a drop of ink in water, the realisation blooms: this is a dream.

For me, it is often this chasing-after-sense, the interplay of sense-making and fabulous rationalisation, that drives the dream world itself. Though my waking world involves enough fantasising, and I desire an even more fantastic oneiric world, the superbly banal is what I most often manage to remember. Even the final sense-breaking that causes the above realisation is rarely enough to push me into full lucidity, but does put its subtle spin onto those dream-only feelings. Sometimes in my dreams, I have the additional realisation that I have had this dream before, perhaps many times; I am never sure, however, whether this dream-déjà vu is not itself illusory, and I am dreaming not only of a fictive event, but of a serially ficticious event. Would those dreams of dreams be about objects within the first dream, or about things in reality which never happened?

Iulia Grigoriu wished to create a performance-installation that would engender precisely that feeling in our audience. Not easy to compass. Anyone can pen a spot of nonsense, have circus acts dancing through the bedroom¹ or suggest we're all flapping our wings toward Cloud Cuckoo Land, but to gradually give the sense of something making sense and not-sense, the uncomfortable limbo of obligation meeting impossibility, or a moment of genuine self-consciousness, this takes some skill. Fortunately, the script she had put together using material from recordings of dreams already contained the ingredients for such an experience.

Iulia is a Romanian director who had relatively recently moved to Berlin and begun working for the local branch of the Romanian Cultural Institute, which promotes, organises, and funds Romanian culture abroad. In addition to events elsewhere, the Berlin branch has a gallery space near Friedrichstraße, entitled "[Ceci n'est pas une] Gallery" (points for an excellent name), and in between exhibitions, they decided to put on this series of performances, the same theme reprised with variations between different 'chapters'. It happens that I had nearly met the current director of the Institute, Cristian Nicolescu, several years earlier when REPLICA held a couple workshops at his space in Kreuzberg, but that is not how I became involved in the project, and I only made the connection much later. (Until that moment, I was quite surprised by the leeway and even enthusiasm the dapper director was giving us, as one expects more conservatism from government institutions. Then it all made sense.)

Rather, I was pulled in by Iris Christidi, who hit it off with Iulia during a chance meeting, and suggested me for one of the 'principal' rôles and a close friend of hers, Beatrice Markopolou, as one of the featured artists, whose works would be on display. The excellent Ioana Elena Urda performed the other principal, and was an absolute delight to perform and improvise with. We were joined by several friends and colleagues during the first chapter and a group of theatre students during the second, who respectively comprised an ensemble: dancing, directing the audience, inhabiting wordless costumed figures, and performing scenic changes behind the audience's collective back.

The piece began as an invitation to a gallery opening, to which the audience RSVPed; their names and coats were taken at the door, and they had some time to wander around the space to look at the pen and ink works by Lăcrămioara Tănase, an artist and architect who draws overlapping feminine faces, warbling lines, and fantastic landscapes. The audience was welcomed to sit in the front room, in which I gave an introduction to her work as a curator. The speech, however, changed halfway through, became a nonsensical conversation about the authenticity of the work, painful teeth, and a profusion of dice. Halfway through, it was taken over by the similarly-garbed Ioana from behind, who then invited the audience to continue in the other room of the gallery.

A succession of scenes in the spaces and subspaces of the two-room gallery involved a an old couple eating breakfast underwater, a woman concerned about the welfare of her species-shifting pet, represented with an AI-generated video by Mihai Grecu, a man weeping into a telephone about how well-adjusted he is, and the telephone weeping back, whilst the audience was asked to take a maths test, say goodbye to the world, dance before a judgemental panel, and take a family photo or celebrate a surprise birthday for one of their number. At the close, we found ourselves in the same gallery scenario that we began with, only all of the work had switched from Lăcrămioara's to Beatrice's, oil paintings of flattened interior and exterior scenes, populated by symbolic objects and dreamy figures. People responded with bewilderment, unease, amusement, and delight, with many reporting that the experience genuinely reminded them of their own dreams.

It was altogether a wonderful project that acheived a fantastic effect using fairly simple resources in a non-theatrical space. I sincerly hope to see further iterations of the series, and to be involved where possible!