Abstract

You enter a room alone. In the midst of hastily scattered belongings a woman lies on a bed, still wearing her jacket. She is sleeping. Who is she, why does she lie here? You hear her thoughts and find yourself in the middle of a story: that she dreams she is sleeping, that someone has entered the room and is now sitting beside her. And that person is you. Dream and reality become entangled. What is your role, what is hers?

Sleeper is a performance that one visits alone, for a duration of approximately ten minutes.

The collaboration between theatremaker/visual artist Jeroen Kee and filmmaker/visual artist BarBara Hanlo results in an intriguing confrontation between film and reality. In a room a filmscreen acts as a large mirror, in which the reflection deviates subtly from the actual room.

One day in the Lloyd Hotel, a visitor came up to me, after he had undergone the performance and told me that he as reading the book of Rüdiger Safranski Wieviel Wahrheit braucht der Mensch? (How much truth o we need). Safranski quotes a famous Chinese Fairy tale in this book. The visitor told me the tale and showed me the page from the book of Safranski where he had just read this. He saw similarities to the tale and performance.

An artist is workingfor years on a single painting. He is old and lonely. When the work is finally finished he invites some off his remaining friends to come and see it. They gather around the painting presenting, a park with a narrow road, which leads to a small house on a hill. At the moment the guests were ready to give their opinion about the painting and turn to the painter they realised that he had disappeared. They looked again at the picture and they see the artist in his painting on the road walking to the house. He opens the door turns back once more to his friends and goes inside. He closes the door behind him.

The visitor saw the woman in the performance as if she disappeared in her own reality.