mind dream theater is a DIY “property-less” audio theater that intends to produce brand new experimental audio plays for the most accessible of venues: our mind. Artistic Director & Founder, Allyson Dwyer
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In 2020 I was accepted into the inaugural SoundLab at The Brick. That same year, digital theater was alive. Readings, live streams, zoom experiments, theater-in-apps, theater as phone calls, theater-as-snail mail letters. Object Collection, Theater in Quarantine, Out of An Abundance of Caution, Ars Nova Supra, UR HERE, and The Exponential Festival were pushing the digital form in mind bending ways. For life and family reasons I live outside New York City, but many nights a week, experimental NYC theater was there on my laptop, in all its bizarre glory. A lover of live theater, I was soon embracing this evolution as something we’d learn from, perhaps for the better.
We all saw the glimmer in the crack trembling below us, even as horrors unfurled across the world. We still don’t really acknowledge how much death really happened (in addition to all the death happening now), and we all snapped back into place. Massive transfers of wealth later, real estate remains the unseen hand in theater, as we all struggle against each other to be seen or heard in the few places that may have us.
We talk a lot about what’s happening in the theater and what can save it. We know it isn’t as ubiquitous an art form anymore, not for the culture at large. But, it turns out everything is online. And you know what else is ubiquitous? The airwaves. Oxygen. Your mind.
Maybe this will historically be seen as a call into the void. But my hope for mind dream theater is that we expand our access to venues, even if that means changing what a venue is. I want the weird art to travel outside the tri-state area and go everywhere. We need a path that is affordable, accessible (both in terms of producing and in welcoming audiences from all over, regardless of ability), and nurturing of experimental voices.
For Season One of our show, we gave each writer the prompt: it is happening again. And that was it. Each episode is like a precious jewel snowflake, something only that writer could create. A chance to have a creative reaction to the world we live in on their terms. A chance to be expressive, without fear of failure or the market or a make-or-break critical moment existing in a short window.
To celebrate the release, we asked each writer to respond with their associative thoughts, in their voice, about a fellow episode from the season:
Theresa Buchheister on Nothing Simple by Jerrod Jordahl
It opens with an extended scream (lol spoiler). And then it pulls back, before it flings forward again with layers of dizzying thoughts and sounds. Even in the cacophony, it seems to be in a great void – A rift in space and time? Heaven? Hell? My skull? Jerrod Jordahl’s Nothing Simple is a poetic, non-narrative, compulsive, nostalgia-inducing, agony-filled slice-of-life from the perspective of omniscience(?). Leah Plante-Wiener’s raspy, rapid, increasingly-unhinged vocal performance is like an anthropomorphic rollercoaster car – it carries me, it flings me around, it is in control and on the tracks and yet I feel a little scared. The brilliant fusion of mind-folding text, electric vocal performance and exciting-spooky-calming sound design in Jerrod’s piece is a perfect example of the vitality of mind dream theater. Without leaving my bed, I was able to go somewhere wild, just for a bit, and remember my frailty, my humanity, my oddity… before flopping back into the rest of my day.
Devon Wade Granmo on Springtime in the USA by Rawya El Chab
The steady rhythm of a ventilator.
The drone underneath.
Then the door opens, the footsteps.
The gentle whispered voice waking Mr. Jean, offering to open the window.
Sounds of the city. Neighbors. Children. Traffic. Birds.
Rawya El Chab’s meditative and elegiac Springtime in the USA welcomes us in.
Then, static and the voice of an American demagogue.
Springtime in the USA, indeed!
And the cycle repeats.
History repeating. The Evil Empire persists.
Lying in bed. Eyes closed. Listening on my headphones to Leonie Bell’s intricate soundscape, I become Mr. Jean, so beautifully evoked by Jeffrey Gardere.
Like Mr. Jean, I might ask: “What time is it?” “What day is it?”
The evils of the empire may beat on, but so too the minutiae of life. The life of people. Of the birds. The Breath and the Drone persist. Ever on.
Rawya El Chab on Rough for Radio III (Annihilation) by Elijah Guo
Earplugs on, I sat to listen to Elijah’s Rough for Radio III (Annihilation). The first time I heard the piece was at Brick Aux. My brain relied on images from a Nestlé Crunch 80’s advertisement: an old French couple sits in bed repeating the same two sentences to each other, unable to hear, while the world outside falls apart under the effects of the candy bar. This ad created the visual framework through which I experienced the piece.
This time around, the couple seemed stuck in an old spaceship drifting through space, filled with unused appliances and knickknacks. Only the kettle and the radio function. Like them, I live with a device constantly speaking to me: a TV displaying numbers, locations, and statements about the latest war. It is happening again. Like the couple, I drift through space on a piece of junk, ignoring the signals and buying more stuff to feel better about the bombs I supply.
God bless the market.
kanishk pandey on Knock Knock Knock by Theresa Buchheister & Ryan William Downey
I listened to this while at my job. It’s honestly how I listen to most podcasts. The monotony of a job and the loop it sets one in is similar to the loop at the center of this piece – Theresa speaking now as this artificial (if anything living and speaking is truly defined as artificial) being grasping at its existence at the hands of its creator, Ryan. I was drawn to think of the voice as a robot – it recalled some of Asimov’s robot stories, such as one that tells of a robot that has a voice like bells ringing. It felt as if this voice was understanding the feeling of living as a process of looping and death as the only escape from looping. And within the landscape of terror, a sound design by Chai that felt like being within the eye of a storm and the storm itself, a line stuck out – focus on the little bird in your ribcage. The beating heart. It’s all we have when dealing with the great weight of being alive.
Jerrod Jordahl on 108 Notes by kanishk pandey
Hitting play, I feel a weird weight that’s not a burden.
I’m burnt out after a long day of looking at screens.
What grounds me (that weird weight; a comforting gravity) is the pleasure of listening.
Two scientists presenting research.
108 notes they found in a library:
An end of the third dimension.
A list of personal items.
A story of counting knuckles 108 times; each a prayer.
kanishk pandey’s dialogue wipes the ash from my brain.
Emma Callahan and Sophie Zmorrod’s performances reveal a pathos that grounds me even more.
And Hannah Birch-Carl’s sound design makes every small moment mythological in proportion.
When the play drops into repetition, the audio shifts, placing one voice in the right channel, and the other in the left.
With me in the middle.
Are they talking to me?
About me?
My experience of listening begins to feel like their experiment.
I count my knuckles 108 times.
Elijah Guo on u ruined my life… again by Catherine Weingarten
I immersed myself in this piece on my headphones while walking down a residential street in Williamsburg, watching “rando” people and imagining whether they were also embroiled in drama with friends who were no longer serving their lives, or embarking on a better path with a new British lover. Weingarten’s modern-text-bubble lexicon is cleverly employed, with the tap-tap-whoosh of the sound design underscoring (…or undermining) the lines drawn in the sand between two sisters on the precipice. A carnivalesque harmony here and there clues us into the fact that all is not as it seems. At first I felt lured in by the melodic Valley-Girl upswings of the colloquial attitude of the two women, but by the end, where an urgent appeal for camaraderie is quashed by the death sentence of “basic” followed by a noncommittal “yeeeah…” I felt the icy weight of heartbreak that hit more deeply than any Shakespearean insult could ever.
Catherine Weingarten on Der Tag Der Kinder or Hamelin Revisited by Devon Wade Granmo
In this piece we listen to an everyman office worker
Trying to survive a potential apocalypse-is the world ending??
Do we care?? Maybe we should…
Blood moon sounds sickkkk
Beginning of piece does it for me- monday do suck!
Cultural institution-where could it be?? I must annoy the playwright and find out
I immediately be stressed when everything starts falling apart-talk about tonal shift godzilla vibezzz
Really dig soundscape-catastrophic vibez-I’m even more stressed and confused than before
This first person narrator really feels convincing-i pity him-
Those rats sound too real and now i’m freaked
Ok now kids r ruined for me-i full on dissociating-the piece started off so happy
But kid also so funny yet relatable – really taking you in
Feel like we’re in a lord of the flies crazy ethereal world
the fun bleakness of the beginning now gonzo dark humor by the end
You can find me at the nearest bar
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