Performed 13th March 2021 at Millions of Us curated by Bree van Reyk, World Square, Sydney
Listen via Mixcloud
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Tim Bruniges of 43'44"
About Dream Opera:
“In August, I had a dream that I wrote an opera… There was a large white wall covering the ocean and there was a small group of performers that scurry through the audience and the sand, and a set of speakers embedded in the wall.”
Dream Opera begun as a dream, where I wrote an opera set at the beach. I presented this as performance lecture in March 2021 and this initial version began as an exploration of creative process and labour, of time and scale. It was about how technology has seeped into every aspect of our lives, including our dreams.
“I tried to follow these coincidences, and they seemed to appear increasingly as I looked for them and read more about dreams.”
In writing this performance lecture, I used a dream as a methodology for writing music. If we consider the dream as a synthesising and rearranging of pre-existing elements witnessed by the artist, it is already not dissimilar to the kind of collecting of ideas, research and samples that my music-making involves. I came across the content of the lecture performance, the texts read from and sampled, through loose online searches or conversations and collected them. The text was written late at night via a voice memo as my neighbours played loud music and I couldn’t sleep. This tired ramble was in a sense, the antithesis to the grand, laborious act of writing an opera; the pinnacle of high art reduced to a kind of free-associating insomnia.
“I began to think about what a dream might offer – both in its temporality and its potential for reality”
In my development of this work, the rearrangement of time became a key element in both dreaming itself, and the use of dreams in opera. The two operas referenced in the initial Dream Opera performance lecture use the dream as a foreshadowing device within the opera’s narrative. J.W. Dunne’s ‘An Experiment with Time’, which I read from in the performance lecture, discusses dreams as a breach in linear time.