A Night with hello!earth

Collectively Dreaming to Create 

 

By Carlos Sánchez : Cifas. “Klaxon 9 - The City Together”.

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“The Danish performance collective hello!earth is proposing something as simple as it is revolutionary: to dream together, collectively, with a desire to imagine other forms of society based on interdependence and community power, in an uncertain territory known as post-capitalism, or more aptly postnow.

The Australian aboriginal worldview maintains that The dream space is the space of creation, the space of life. Here things are created and decided. The material form is only the consequence of the dream space, and we consider that dead material. Beginning with this premise, hello!earth, specialized in creating participatory cross-disciplinary art works with (a) relational approach, where the presence of the audience is the co-creating and central element, invites us to dream in The Night, visioning a postcapitalist society while we sleep.

 

The experience entails spending a night in a suitable place with some thirty persons who do not necessarily know each other.Since 2015, with the help of artists, curators and interested people, the collective has been researching through a series of meetings, residences, and open laboratories held in Denmark, Finland, and Barcelona. This intense prospecting process has resulted in the crafting of a collective creation and vision space, a testing ground to be inhabited, in which the potential for dream practice and creating new communities are core elements. The proposal for this 12-hour participatory performance is at once radical and risky, for it seeks to make a situation—as fragile and ephemeral as spending a night together with strangers—serve as a catalyst and a trigger to generate more in-depth discussion and to rethink relationships based on the economy of encounter and exchange.

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The Night is a symbolic journey, an initiation ritual into our collective dream and an open invitation to imagine other paths. Body and mind are prepared through multiple exercises, actions, and activities developed individually, as a couple, and collectively. Each participant follows an itinerary, reserves dream services during the night (transformed into a shepherd who cares for other sleepers, living through intergalactic encounters, walking or dancing a choreography outdoors...) or simply tries to sleep and dream like on any other night.

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Ultimately, what bearing does this have with a concept as complex as post-capitalism? While the experience serves as a potent slogan to lure like-minded dreamers, perhaps it would be better to speak of post-now, something beyond this now, a now laden with dystopian overtones. Rather than criticizing capitalism or perpetuating its legacy by “invoking it, this noctural experience connects with a generalized longing and feeling that attracts and impels us toward something still unknown. Inhabiting the night, opening up and letting ourselves go, as occurs in a dream state, but this time, collectively. This immaterial space is welcoming for soul and spirit, at a remove from the rationale of profit and productivity. A space for new ideas and fresh musings. Dream sweet dreams. The author’s dreams and experiences during the night of June 5 to 6, 2018 at the DNA Festival of Contemporary Dance in Navarre.

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Night falls under a waning moon. The old citadel gates in the historic city of Pamplona-Iruña are closed. We are inside. About thirty people, mostly strangers to one another, with a sleeping bag and a toothbrush, we enter a large white refuge. The park is closed off to nocturnal walkers. But tonight, we will traverse that injunction, and dream, collectively. The most revolutionary ideas are usually also the simplest.

Night envelops us. We are liquid identities, unknown to one another, eager with a common goal: to surrender to dreams, to embrace during the REM phase.

We follow instructions, we practice, we execute some exercises, we search for our animal... Invariably, chance is a law impelled by causality. We walk in darkness, we project ourselves into a utopian future from the dystopia of the big city. We return to savour a light soup, huddled around a pale flame in a shelter at once as ephemeral and imperfect as cozy.

We prepare to detach ourselves, to collapse into sleep. We reserve dream services, individual and collective surprises, to be activated during the night. Starry darkness spies upon us. The cold keeps us alert but dreams overcomes us, yawns overwhelms us, and finally wakefullness defies us after we’ve spread ourselves about, to run around the bonfire, to release ballast, to lighten up.

In search of the dream’s interstices, we yearn to be dragged by a vortex of purifying energy to imagine an unknown and perhaps fragile post-capitalist society; it could be a green nation, an equitable community with Ubuntu, an antipodean forest that regenerates following each dew bath. Trapped, we run, we dance a choreography, we open our skulls, we are born and we die (without pain), we undergo interstellar encounters... until the light of dawn and the sound shakes us, swaying us gently.

Our small communities feel robust in their fragility, anchored in concentric circles. We look for openings to expand relationships, the commons, we long to entangle ourselves. In the words of Josep Maria Esquirol, we encounter nihilism in the search for the nexus in the border areas.

Breakfast advances between words that reflect on the voyage. Something difficult to articulate and express. We stretch and touch, without embracing each other without listening to everybody's voices. The group fragments, inexorably. A forced farewell, inevitably. We live a shared personal experience, an experience to expand our objectives and provide feedback in time and space. Milesker, thanks.

 

Fra: Cifas. “Klaxon 9 - The City Together