We’re smack in the middle of the glamorous 1930s. Looking ahead to the next room, there’s a moment of culture shock. I may not have been able to take anything in (there’s a $3 coat/bag check), but here’s what I came out with.Ĭharacters in the Bar played by Mia Mountain and William Popp (photos from Sleep No More website) (So long, I’ve had to break it up into two posts. If you are not sprinting down the stairs in pursuit of a character, you are in my way. I’m still having vivid dreams about this “show.” Like so many others, I long to return to Manderley. What follows is a theatrical experience unlike any other because it is fully what you make of it. Inside: Shakespeare’s Macbeth meets Hitchcock’s Rebecca and it’s all told through dance (did someone put together a show based on my favorite things?).
And while you may be frightened on occasion, nothing will jump out at you. So I had enough of a guide to tell me what I needed to know to make my experience a complete one:Ī 1930s hotel. HFS clients enjoy state-of-the-art warehousing, real-time access to critical business data, accounts receivable management and collection, and unparalleled customer service.When I was in New York in late August (just before I started school), I was lucky enough to attend Sleep No More with Emily, who had been before. HFS provides print and digital distribution for a distinguished list of university presses and nonprofit institutions. MUSE delivers outstanding results to the scholarly community by maximizing revenues for publishers, providing value to libraries, and enabling access for scholars worldwide. Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content, providing access to journal and book content from nearly 300 publishers. With warehouses on three continents, worldwide sales representation, and a robust digital publishing program, the Books Division connects Hopkins authors to scholars, experts, and educational and research institutions around the world. With critically acclaimed titles in history, science, higher education, consumer health, humanities, classics, and public health, the Books Division publishes 150 new books each year and maintains a backlist in excess of 3,000 titles.
The division also manages membership services for more than 50 scholarly and professional associations and societies. The Journals Division publishes 85 journals in the arts and humanities, technology and medicine, higher education, history, political science, and library science. The Press is home to the largest journal publication program of any U.S.-based university press. One of the largest publishers in the United States, the Johns Hopkins University Press combines traditional books and journals publishing units with cutting-edge service divisions that sustain diversity and independence among nonprofit, scholarly publishers, societies, and associations.
Inscribing literary character in performance space, both invoking and resisting the voyeuristic politics of modern fourth-wall performance, Sleep No More charts the pervasive legacy of largely literary conceptions of theatricality to the making of "new" performance, and-in its dynamic foregrounding of text, character, space, and audience-opens a series of questions about the apparent emancipation of the spectator, and about the character of "cognition," offered by theatrical "immersion." Although it leaves the spoken text of Macbeth almost entirely behind, Punchdrunk Theatre's Sleep No More-first performed in London in 2003, mounted again in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2009, and currently running in New York City-undertakes a complex reflection on Shakespeare performance today, putting a reciprocal pressure on the critical history, situation, and practice of those terms of the art: "Shakespeare," "performance." Asserting an "immersive" epistemology, Sleep No More nonetheless evokes a surprisingly persistent, even New Critical conception of scripted language and performance.