Dream Yards
Touring 1/5

Dream Yards has enjoyed an interesting history.

Claire Hind and Gary Winters started the project by collecting accounts of dreams at a series of drop-in events across Yorkshire and the resultant archive formed the basis of a promenade production that mapped them on to the alleyways and ginnels of York.

The pair have now turned the piece into a studio performance that’s set on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean.

Here they encounter a series of lost souls including King Kong, a skeletal Roy Orbison and the “abominable” Sigmund Freud.

The circular and surreal conversations with this improbable cast about the film Tea With Mussolini and sunglasses have all the hallmarks of vivid dreams.

Yet despite the piece being written with input from neuro psychoanalyst Mark Solms, there’s little science woven into the script.

Promoted as having the score mapped onto the five stages of sleep, in practice this translates as little more than Hind outlining them as she reads them aloud and Winters producing miniature heads from a rucksack to further document processes such as sleep spindles and delta waves.

Conveyed in abstract lecture form, this dream science bears little correlation with the character interviews or any sense of the piece progressing from hypnogogic hallucinations to REM sleep.

There are moments of fantastical humour throughout this amorphous production, notably an animal-suited Hind erratically singing Summertime below a disco ball.

But, like a dream, the piece is frustratingly disjointed and feels very much like a work in progress.

Tour details: www.clairehind.com