“Is this the beginning?” asks a man in a T-shirt who steps out of the audience of Double Edge Theatre’s new spectacle “Memories and Dreams” to take center stage at the outdoor pavilion on the company’s farm in Ashfield. During the ensemble’s dress rehearsal the other night for the show, which runs from July 21 to Aug. 8, the man speaks of anxiety dreams about being an unprepared actor, about eating past full. “Wait, this has already happened. … This didn’t really go as we thought it was going to go.”
A troupe of performers in black and white suddenly arrives and paints his face white and dresses him in a black coat. He speaks of eternity and grieving. They dance.
We follow the performance as it roves through gardens and fields, indoors and out again. The order of events varies. It can feel a bit like drifting through glimpses of dreams, hints of visions. We stop along a creek, where (performers costumed as) a bird, a lama and other creatures emerge from the foliage. We walk to a garden, where people dressed in white dance, some characters seem to have boulders for heads, and a person in white flies overhead (on a wire). “We here were once stars propelled through immeasurable events.”
As we walk to the next scene, a chorus sings: “Each of us is a thousand stories long.”
“I think myth certainly informs this work. Both the adventure of myth and the personal in myth,” co-director and co-designer Jeremy Louise Eaton tells me after the rehearsal. “…I think dreams yield myth. Maybe the dream is the super intimate personal experience and the myth is the universal outward expression of a human question or metaphor or struggle.” The show interweaves dreams and myths, “maybe allowing people to feel that their dreams—which can feel insignificant or small—can be mythic.”
As the sun begins to set, a performer in black and white insists on the perfection of a summer tomato, he suggests a journey, he dashes off into the fields. When we follow, he magically appears next to us and leads us to a garden. “There are no limits to dreams,” he says. “Just don’t wake me up.”
Inside a barn-theater, an actor asks, “Of what is the colored artist capable?” And announces a story from W.E.B. Du Bois of a Princess Steel (“For years, our home has been under attack by the White Lord”), the White Lord, a knight in silver, a Smoke Queen. “We are celebrating moving forward together. Healing from the past to make a new future,” the Princess says. The show heads back outside into the night. A man talks of towns flooded to create a reservoir. Women light torches, swing in trees, swim across a mirror-smooth pond, sing to followers of the ancient Greek god Bacchus.
Du Bois’s tale is “a very simple story about oppression and taking back your own story,” co-director and co-designer Stacy Klein tells me after the rehearsal. “All these stories are about taking back your own story. … In my mind, it’s pretty evident that we need to reclaim our stories and we need to take back our rites and our rights.”
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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, nature, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, (hopefully) weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content ©Greg Cook 2021 or the respective creators.)