#Sleep no more masks archive

#Sleep no more masks archive

The Wikis, “The McKittrick Hotel Unofficial Guide” and the “Sleep No More Wiki,” attempt to concretize the ephemeral work, to capture and archive it in its entirety, such that it might become knowable as a totality. These collaboratively built databases track the constantly shifting set of cast members, as well as mapping out the endless rooms in the McKittrick, cataloguing the performance’s scenes, and recording various private, one-on-one experiences between audience members and characters. In an attempt to comprehend or represent Sleep No More in its entirety, an online community of the work’s fans have developed several Wikis. These types of moments are instructive ones, directing the spectator’s attention to the expansiveness of the performance’s potential, while also emphasizing its fundamental limitations, as you are faced with the need to choose between these numerous potential experiences. Sleep No More ensures that this endless potential is felt: as you stand watching Lady Macbeth bathe in one room, you cannot help but hear Punchdrunk’s impressively engineered soundscapes indicating action taking place in an adjacent room. The performance deals in excess: since the performance takes place in a fragmentary form, scattered across the entirety of the McKittrick, there are always more scenes to be seen, more spaces to explore, and more experiences to be had. Similarly, any experience of the totality of the performance remains inaccessible: as Josephine Machon states, each individual’s experience of the show “would be unrepeatable were they to attend every performance across the entirety of said run” (31). Using Sleep No More as a case study, this paper will explore the ways in which audience engagement with performance in a virtual sphere – using such social media platforms as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to respond to the performance – foregrounds the tension between limits and potential in contemporary performance.įeaturing 100,000 square feet of performance space across five floors, Sleep No More’s McKittrick Hotel is physically immense – comprehending the space in its entirety is an improbable feat for the average spectator. From a practical standpoint, the interplay between the boundless and the boundaried shape the experience of Sleep No More, both in person and online. Worthen describes the production as “an experience that combines sensory overload with sensory deprivation” (87). Black-masked guides usher you down a hallway, but later coldly refuse entry. Doors which are closed are found to be locked, only to become accessible at some later point during the performance. Roaming from floor-to-floor and room-to-room, one can unexpectedly find themselves somewhere they’ve been before – an experience made especially uncanny by the ease and frequency with which it occurs (and recurs).

The McKittrick Hotel – the grand-scale setting for Punchdrunk’s performance – possesses a maze-like geography. This darkness has more than a thematic purpose: it exercises control over the audience, limiting their movements and creating a clear division between that which is knowable and that which is not. The work, an immersive adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (with a number of influences from Hitchcock thrown in for good measure) takes to heart Macbeth’s entreaty, “Let not light see my black and deep desires” (I.iv), as darkness and secrecy pervade the performance space.

The initial encounter with Sleep No More is of its entrance: a long, pitch-black, labyrinthine hallway, which slowly draws you ineluctably towards some uncertain destination, invisible until it is directly in front of you. “Me thought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!