Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
Inspired by the award-winning book of the same name by poet a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists pairs sleep and dream studies with lepidoptery, the study of butterflies and moths. Tracking the stages of sleep and pairing them with the life cycle of butterflies and moths, insomnia is mirrored in the birth of the egg and narcolepsy in larval hatching. And when the caterpillar starts its final moult, dreams begin, weaving around us as tightly as a cocoon until we are somnambulant, a chrysalis ready to emerge as a moth.
It’s a story, it’s not a story.
It has elements of story.
Pattern your breath on the sound of moth wings, magnified and frenzied, as you fight for sleep in a suffocating tangle of sheets. This is a poetic fantasia, an erotic nightmare-scape. So we dream the same – do we dream the same? Even when the body falls asleep, the brain’s hearing pathways do not shut down. Even in the hours of deepest slumber, sound can be imprinted on your memory.
Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is produced by VaVaVoom Theatre and Bedroom Community and was premiered in May 2014, at the 28th edition of Reykjavik Arts Festival.
Valgeir Sigurðsson
a rawlings
A team of scientists including Harvard University lepidopterists and University College London sleep research scientists worked closely with us on the creation of Wide Slumber. We have curated a series of events that can be presented in tandem with the performance including a butterfly pinning workshop, lectures on the metamorphosis of butterflies and sleep science, and installations.
Valgeir Sigurðsson
(Composer) has earned acclaim for his three solo albums and a steadily growing number of works for orchestras and ensembles across Europe and North America. He has written music for film, dance and theatre as well as appearing as producer, engineer and arranger on over one hundred albums. In all of his projects, Valgeir bends and blends familiar sounds to expose the new within the known, resulting in a body of work ripe with emotion, curiosity, and humanity.
a rawlings
(Author) is a Canadian poet, editor, and interdisciplinary artist. Her genre-bending work embraces acoustic ecology, counter-mapping, improvisation, and ecopoetics. Her literary debut Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006) received an Alcuin Award for Design. She is the recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship (Canada, 2009) and held the position of Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence (Australia, 2012). Her poetry has been translated into Dutch, French, Icelandic, Korean, and Spanish.