A new critical book delving into the “various psychological underpinnings of the aesthetics, fandoms, and experience of Sleep No More” released this past month, and we’ve got an exclusive excerpt.

 In The Psychgeist Of Pop Culture - Sleep No More, part of research psychologist Dr. Rachel Kowert’s series that gathers critical essays on everything from Taylor Swift to Warhammer, editors Kowert and Dr. Betsy Sullivan gather a rockstar cadre of writers including former Sleep No More cast member Ilana Gilovich, Submersive Productions' Glenn Ricci, and our own Kathryn Yu to delve deep into what makes the labyrinthine show at the heart of the immersive renaissance tick.

And then there is Felix Barrett MBE, founder Artistic Director of Punchdrunk and the director of Sleep No More, who writes elegantly about the origin story of the the show, how happenstance elements became design aesthetics, and gives glimpses of possible futures for the show which is being performed in Shanghai and Seoul and, as Barrett writes, just might be popping up in a third, as yet unannounced city.

In this exclusive excerpt from the book, Barrett begins the story of how Sleep No More came to be, taking us from his finals at the university of Exeter to dropping off the proposal for what would become the show by hand.

For the rest of the story, including Barrett's take on the current Age of Immersive and the future of Sleep No More, the whole of The Psychgeist Of Pop Culture – Sleep No More, can be found by following this link.

A PDF of the whole work is available for free, with print copies of the work going for just $13.99 and the Ebook for $4.99 if you'd like to support The Psychgeist Of Pop Culture series. (That's a steal. - Ed. note.)

The Sleep No More story starts 25 years ago. For my finals at the university of Exeter, I picked directing and wanted to play with site specificity and site sympathetic approach to found space. I also wanted to explore the idea of deconstructing a famous text to enable an audience to follow characters within it and to explore a play as you would do a new city or place you’d never been to before, where everything was there to be uncovered.

And as part of my final piece, I did a version of Buchner’s Woyzeck - which is inherently episodic - and they were put on a loop structure with the audience exploring territorial army barracks. I realised that the problem with this was: how did you realise when you came across a performer? How did you know you weren’t exploring the vast 50 room territorial army barracks and bumping into another audience member?

So the epiphany was to put the audience in masks, in neutral masks so that they became part of the scenography, they became anonymous and as such, they were empowered in their anonymity to experience the show in whichever way they wanted, be that following a character or exploring the environment. That was in the year 2000.

After a few more attempts at this form, which I was trying to excavate and push deeper into other Shakespeare texts like The Tempest, the spaces were getting more epic but the actual performance language, once you actually stumbled across it, had suddenly become underwhelming in vast story scapes. So this takes us to day 1 of the Sleep No More story.

Being back in London, having been away in Exeter in the Southwest of England for 5 years, I was looking for likeminded people who were making performance work site specifically or site sympathetically. I heard about a dance piece that was happening down by the river on the Thames. It was the last night of the show as I heard about it, so I rang up trying to get a ticket. I spoke to the box office who mentioned it was totally sold out. I asked when I could queue for returns and they said, “no chance, you’ll never get in.” So I pleaded with them and said that I was making this sort of work and I really wanted to make connections and meet the people who were doing it.

The very nice lady on the line said: “Oh if you're actually making this sort of work, we're running a competition where we're looking for ideas for a found space, site sympathetic productions, and if picked, you'll get a producer to help raise money and help get it on”. The deadline for that was the following day. So I didn't go see the show, but I sat down and realised that I needed to apply and because it was for a dance company, it was a dance sponsorship, that sort of forced my thinking into putting pen to paper. So I imagined Shakespeare's Macbeth as a Hitchcock thriller but told completely through the medium of contemporary dance, where every single line of the play is in the show, but none of it is spoken. All of it is transposed into the set design, into the speed of the lighting fades, into the smells of this empty space, and into the physical vocabulary of the performers.

And the reason why this idea came into the forefront was that a few weeks earlier, I'd been with an old lecturer from university, and he'd put on a new recording of the Scottish Philharmonic, taking Bernard Herman's scores to famous Hitchcock movies and remastering them.

And there were such lush, rich, densely textured productions, the actual source of the recording process was so immersive that one particular one, the soundtrack of Vertigo, suddenly pulled me in and within that music, I could see a whole world, a whole environment, a whole landscape that I wanted to explore. And with my practice, it’s always music that’s the starting point.

And within that one piece of music, the whole show was there to be excavated. And in fact, Sleep No More as it was in New York and as it is currently in Seoul and in Shanghai, that piece of music plays throughout the show, and it's the one time the entire building is unified by the same soundtrack - all 31 sound zones become one. So with that piece of music in mind and the sense that the similarities between Macbeth as a play - a tale of jealousy, of ambition, of passion, of range, of femme fatales - it’s all chimed with Hitchcock motifs, that film noir genre. Maybe Lady Macbeth is the ultimate femme fatale - I put this all on paper. And as I’m writing up, I didn't want to just press go on an email. It was really hard to articulate this the day before the deadline for the competition, that actually this was about a piece as an atmosphere, as a proper living breeding ecosystem and environment, a sort of flavour that would wash over you and seep into your pores. And it's very hard to articulate that with words alone.

So instead of putting it in an email, I typed out on my grandfather's old typewriter. And then took that paper copy, put it in a Manila envelope, put that in the breastpocket of my grandfather's old denim jacket, put the denim jacket with some shoes, a tie and a shirt in an old suitcase, all from the 30s. Added some bottles in for some scent, flavour and texture and then dropped off that suitcase on the doorstep of the dance company that was running the competition. And so, essentially, the contents of that suitcase is Sleep No More. That’s Part I.

Don't stop now, go read the rest!

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!

In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.