NO SLEEPING

Dreaming doesn’t need a bedroom. It’s more that the bedroom needs the dream.

Or is it that the bedroom needs the dreamer, to become a place for dreaming?

NO SLEEPING celebrates the photographic impulse to commemorate and preserve, while ruminating on futures lost. The shapeshifting nature of grief guides this gently interactive performance, with an array of devices that use light in a photographic manner (historic, low tech, and the technology of now), to occupy rooms and bedrooms of historic homes where someone remembered may have slept.

Through spoken word, soundscapes, and video projection, this reflection on preservation is a devotional investigation of place and memory that asks the audience to move out of the mindset of simply watching, to become a collaborator through the audience direction of Sue Murad and Deb Todd Wheeler, and a lite taste (with a nod to the period) by Maureen Coffey.

The origin story for NO SLEEPING begins with images and prose Deb Todd Wheeler wrote and captured while searching for a connection between historic homes open to the public and her own relationship to the private, non-historic site of her late son Lucas’ bedroom. Her interest in preserving the objects in Lucas’ room led her to look around at others who preserve objects across generations, and invite a more expansive conversation on communal observation. She turned to Sue Murad, whose idiosyncratic engagement with objects, site, histories, documentation, and performance engages somatic impulse, following curious threads to unlikely places. Together with curator Shana Dumont Garr and artist Maureen Coffey they have created a time-based, long form intrepid series of performances.

The team just completed their time as artists in residence at the Meetinghouse in Harvard, MA to develop a template for NO SLEEPING, and will be hosting live experiments at historic sites (with bedrooms) in the region May-November 2025.

If you are interested in joining an audience at an historic site (or if you are an historic site interested in hosting NO SLEEPING), please fill out the form below.

Curated by Shana Dumont Garr

Co-Created by Deb Todd Wheeler and Sue Murad

Gastronomy by Maureen Coffey