DREAM LOVE ESCAPE

The impetus for Dream Love Escape arose from a desire to explore what it means to come back together in public, in art making, in person, after this long period of isolation. What might it be like to gather in public spaces? How can we reemerge, recognizing that we are essentially and irrevocably changed by the pandemics of the last year? What happens next?

Derby Square and Shakespeare’s words offer us an opportunity to dream together. The text is familiar but transformed as a vehicle for actors to journey through the forest of the verse in order to find their lover, their part in the play, and their fairy self. In turn the performers welcome the audience into a regular public space made festive by the experience of gathering there in celebration. Celebration as an act of defiance.

We invite you to consider the square a point of entry into a moment transformed, to dream, to love, to escape. Use civic space as a force of connection and Shakespeare as a point of access. We look to rave traditions as a model of inclusive, celebratory, and irreverent community with a pulsating bass. We invite you to join in the rhythm and the dance as the Fae occupy the public square.

This performance is an event that we create together - the rave, the flash mob, the celebration, the re-mix of a play we thought we knew.

-THERESA LANG