Rapid Eye Movement (R.E.M.)

A Pre-Club Show · "The Club of Your Dreams"

Rapid Eye Movement is an immersive, participatory club performance — a "pre-club show" that erupts inside a working nightclub and then dissolves into the night it interrupted. Conceived as a piece of integrated reality entertainment, it folds aerial work, hip hop dance, pole and burlesque, martial arts and stunt choreography, live DJing, drumline, beatboxing, emceeing, puppetry, and large-scale video projection into a single environmental experience where the audience is never quite sure where the show ends and the party begins.

Patrons arrive to a bare, industrial room, pay a cover, and buy drinks and tapas as a pre-show DJ sets the mood. There are no rows of seats and no proscenium — the crowd stands, mingles, and is absorbed into the work as it unfolds around, above, and among them. When the room fills, the lights cut out and the dream begins.

SCRIPT LINKED HERE

Originally written in 2004 and developed toward production through 2010–2011.

The Premise

At the center of the piece is Dr. DJ — part mad scientist, part turntablist deity — presiding from a raised booth strung with glowing test tubes and a Frankenstein lever, an Einstein wig under his headphones. He is running an experiment on three sleeping subjects, The Dreamers, who lie on inclined hospital beds as a split-screen film exposes the rapid eye movement behind their lids and the fantasies firing underneath. What follows is the staging of those dreams: three subconscious worlds, each given its own theatrical language and built from the bodies of a ten-person, multidisciplinary cast. A woman dreams her way out of her own repression. A man dreams himself a superhero, a fighter, a champion. Another man loops through the same botched seduction until he gets it right. Between them, Dr. DJ scores the unconscious in real time. In the final reversal, the lights find Dr. DJ himself on the operating table, the three Dreamers standing over him in lab coats — the experimenter revealed as the subject, the audience left to wonder who was dreaming whom.

The Experience

R.E.M. is structured as a single uninterrupted flow rather than a sequence of separated numbers. The performance moves continuously through the venue — across the floor, up the walls, overhead in harness, and onto screens — and then opens out into a genuine club rave, with cast members pulling the audience into the dance. After the show closes, the evening continues as a club: DJ set, bar, light food, a merchandise booth (programs, shirts, and collectible "pop puppets"), cast signing, a silent auction on the show's Giant Pop Puppet positioned as hip hop memorabilia, and VIP.

The work is conceived as serial — Volume 1, Number 1 — with each future production a new "issue," refreshed by material drawn from its audience.

Scene Outline

Scene I — Pure Imagination. Three "Einstein women" hang plastered into the wall in metallic tape. They peel free, fall, and are caught in a web of tape as a piano plays "Pure Imagination," which they sing before a grimy beat drops. From the floor, three men begin to move as if puppeteered from above, building to windmills below the spinning aerialists.

Scene II — The Experiment. Dr. DJ is revealed at his booth. As he mixes, the three Dreamers appear asleep on hospital beds, their dreaming minds projected in split-screen montage — childhood images, interviews, and the first flashes of each fantasy — under a clinical British voiceover defining REM sleep. The music accelerates into blackout.

Scene III — The Woman's Dream. A woman in a tailored corporate suit is tempted by poles that descend and advance from every angle. She resists, then surrenders — not to a single pole but to a full caged maze of them, climbing and winding through an intricate burlesque that sheds her constricting layers until she stands triumphant at the top.

Scene IV — The Hero's Dream. A Dreaman leaps from a sixteen-foot platform, falling in harness as projected scrims race a building past him until it explodes into fire. Two more men scale the walls like spider-men into an aerial fight of martial arts and stunt work, which resolves into a boxing-ring framing: an emcee raps the introduction to a step-and-b-boy dance battle, the dreamer's crew wins, and he claims the room.

Scene V — The Player's Dream. Scored entirely by beatbox, a man relives the same club entrance and seduction three times in déjà-vu loops — each attempt failing and resetting — until he finally reads the moment right, asks the woman to dance, and the whole room tips over into a rave.

Scene VI — The Wake. A drum corps and bullhorn beatboxers fill the space. A popper duets with a giant puppet, beat for beat, before breakers and aerialists return for an all-out party with the crowd. Dr. DJ's booth rolls through the room like a float, the cast worshipping around it — until a final film pans back to reveal Dr. DJ asleep on the hospital bed, the three Dreamers now his doctors: "Did you have sweet dreams?"

The Participatory & Transmedia Layer

R.E.M. is designed to be co-authored by its audience and extended beyond the room:

Dream solicitation. Through the website and social channels, the public submits their own dreams; the creative team weaves the most compelling ones into future productions, and submitters are notified when and where their dream may appear.
Open media & auditions. Audiences contribute images and video for the show's mixed-media sequences, and artists and collectives upload work as online auditions for upcoming editions.
Augmented reality. A second layer of performance lives over the live one — ghosts and fantasy figures at the bar, art painted into the air, and scavenger-hunt clues hidden through the space.
Props as art. Signature objects, including the Giant Pop Puppet, are offered through online bidding as collectible art and hip hop memorabilia.

Form & Disciplines

A ten-person ensemble of cross-trained performers carries the work across aerial, breaking and popping, pole and burlesque, martial arts and stunt choreography, DJing, drumline, beatboxing, emceeing, puppetry, and acting — supported by live and recorded sound, projection design, and an environmental lighting plan that turns a club into a dreamscape and back again.