In the dimly lit halls of the McKittrick Hotel in New York City, there are no transcripts to read, no seats to sit, only an unforgettable and spontaneous adventure. There is only the immediate demand to see, hear, touch, and feel. Sleep No More, a show by British theater company Punchdrunk, retells the story of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A story stirred by violence and paranoia, Sleep No More creates an immersive, wordless, and intimate relationship between the audience and the series of sensory experiences. The plot of Macbeth follows Macbeth, a Scottish general, who encounters three witches who prophesizes that he will become the King of Scotland. Spurred by the prophecy and his wife’s drive for power, Macbeth murders the king to take the throne. However, Macbeth gets increasingly paranoid, committing more murders in pursuit of securing his power. Diving into the show, Susan Sontag’s decades-old manifesto, “Against Interpretation,” becomes prominent. Sontag argues that the modern habit of seeking content and meaning behind art diminishes our sensory experience, creating a definite translation of something indefinite. The modern example of Sontag’s idea of “Against Interpretation”, Sleep No More, creates an art form where interpretation is structurally impossible and the recovery of our senses (i.e. five fundamental senses, exploration, and immediate experience) is the entire point.
By making the audience masked and anonymous, Sleep No More redefines the role of an audience member. It strips them of their critical distance, turning them into the participants of the stories themselves spontaneously. The masked audience cannot be detached from the show. Being detached from the art, looking afar from a distance, makes you someone who criticizes. As Sontag mentions, criticism should function as “to show how it is what it is… rather than to show what it means” (9). By abolishing the distance between audience members and actors, the former can emotionally feel the art of the show. The audience is figuratively immersed, becoming the “how” of the art itself. The show is inherently nerve-wracking, much like how Sontag believes “[r]eal art has the capacity to make us nervous” (5). There’s no power dynamic in Sleep No More, creating vulnerability and allowing viewers to connect with their inner states and likewise with the story. As the audience is immediately disoriented and is faced with uncertainties of the plot in the fast-paced, ever-changing story with different perspectives, they’re “[experiencing] more immediately what we have” (4). This raw experience gives the art power to convey its true purpose to the audience, engrossment. By having the audience follow the plot not only cognitively, but physically, they cannot interpret the “meaning.” In such a space, they are not allowed to violate the integrity of art through interpretation.
Building on the idea of ambiguity, Sleep No More offers a multi-sensory, interactive experience rather than an intellectual one, fostering a deep emotional engagement. The art of interpretation has made us numb to actual enjoyment, the meaning of art. As Sontag prompts us to “recover our senses” and urges us to “learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” Sleep No More destroys the line between audience, rejuvenates one’s senses (9). The audience’s masks create a pure visual environment, forcing you to see more intently. Changing from room to room, scene to scene, audience members also experience chasing actors, actively trying to follow the plot. The absence of dialogue, only footsteps, and periodic music makes you hear more acutely. The ability to touch props and even the actors make you feel more. In such an “hermeneutics” environment, the experience becomes truly “erotic,” unique and intimate (10). The feelings cannot be directly translated, yet the audiences feel a deeper connection. The show involves 1:1 sessions where audience members are chosen at random to interact with. The interactions were as simple as making eye contact to ones with greater influence, like being whispered about a task to be done. In such a sense, the experience is intimate, where the audience is part of the show, feeling like they are living it. By embracing transparency, audiences can have a more direct and liberating experience of the artwork, allowing its full power to be felt.
Sleep No More dismantles the linear complexities of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, making the audience feel overwhelmed and even lost in the content. The show cuts back on the content of Macbeth by leaving only the raw, atmospheric experience, canceling all dialogues involved since “[o]ur task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all” (Sontag 9). As such, the audience goes through more “description” of emotions of guilt, paranoia, and supernatural dread. Cutting a guiding narrator to explain what you’re seeing, every sound, every gesture, and every room demands your full sensory attention. Simultaneously, Sontag points out that “thorough descriptions of form would silence” the “arrogance of interpretation” (8). The show was in three loops, where characters would reset and the same act would be expressed from a perspective of another character. Having the audience jump back and forth, almost like different dimensions, truly “silences” interpretation. They don’t have to assume what happens beyond the act; the show forces upon a pre-determined interpretation. D.H. Lawrence argues that rather than trusting the “teller,” we should “trust the tale”; as the “tale” it is something you must physically discover and feel (qtd. in Sontag 6). This serves as a caution not to trust the author as the art may be affected by their biases, but to trust the art. Having a non-linear plot accomplishes this application, giving the audience a multitude of non-biased perspectives to interpret. By making the narrative non-linear, the show becomes hard to interpret, and instead, the audience gets to feel the art in all.
Encouraging us to reconsider our default mode of consuming art, Sleep No More argues that the most powerful art does not have a meaning to be extracted but rather experienced.In the age of media of greater oversaturation, overinterpretation can lead to distorted understandings of material and unruly conclusions. Sontag wants us to “recover our senses” (9). As such, we must create a new type of literacy, sensory literacy, that creates a world where we don’t have to think twice about our own stimulations.
Work Cited
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation, Picador, 1966, pp. 1-10