Built from our own dreams, Dream Palace unfolds through synchronicity, incubation, and practices both tried and emerging. Artistically, philosophically, and dramaturgically, we will feel our way forward.
All we know for sure: it is calling.
Contact
Here
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@isthisadreampalace
All we know for sure: it is calling.
Contact
Here
@isthisadreampalace
About
Dream Palace is an interdisciplinary theatre that explores dreaming. It draws inspiration from the memory palace, a method of mapping memory through imaginal architecture. We approach dreaming, memory, and theatre as a dynamic loop where the landscape is never settled but always reshaped by the movements of recall.
The Story So Far
Dream Palace is a living architecture for dreaming together. Since its first gathering, it has moved between cities and landscapes that carry a charge, places where the boundary between waking and dreaming feels thin. Each edition is site-specific, shaped by the history and pulse of the place it inhabits.
Previous meetings have taken us to Athens, where working with the ancient roots of theatre and the Greek chorus cracked something open, and to Cairo, where sitting on a rooftop with the pyramids in the circle brought us face to face with the mystery of dreaming and the ancient world.
The Director
Leslie Claire is a director, curator, and the founder and artistic director of Dream Palace. She is also director of Apiary Studios and 7xHa.
Each iteration of Dream Palace is shaped by a different constellation of collaborators curated by Leslie. She works at the intersection of theatre, collective imagination, and cultural research, summoning the spaces, the people, and the conditions for something unpredictable to emerge.
Dreamaturgy
The practice at the heart of Dream Palace has a name: dreamaturgy.
It was developed by theatre-makers and longtime collaborators Daisy Campbell and Kate Alderton, the same minds behind Cosmic Trigger: The Play!, the Cerne2CERN pilgrimage, and the Dream Fishing Society. Leslie encountered their work when she was one of the 69 pilgrims set from the Cern Abbes Hardon to the big CERN Hadron and recognised in it a trulu inspiring architecture.
Where dramaturgy asks what a story needs to become itself, dreamaturgy asks the same of a dream. It is a practice of working with dreams not as symbols to be decoded, but as living forces to be tended — allowed to keep dreaming beyond the moment of waking, beyond interpretation, beyond the human desire to tie everything up with a bow.
In Kate's words: the community that learns to operate on the basis of the circulating gift of dreams will be the community immune to the commodification of desire that so threatens the true potential of the human spirit.
Collective dreaming, as practised at Dream Palace, is not about dream interpretation. It is about what happens when dreams are allowed to speak to each other, to speak through us, to remain alive. It is about the intimacy of sharing the visions that become possible when a group of people dream together with intention.
For more inspiration on dreamaturgy jump into this fascinating conversation between Leslie, Kate and Daisy
Here
Here
Why Dreaming Now?
We are living through a time of profound uncertainty, and a time of profound creative possibility. The old stories are wearing thin. The new ones have not yet fully emerged.
Dream Palace exists in that gap.
Dream Palace exists in that gap.