“We wanted to make work and they were the people who were willing to help us,” Barrett said. The cost of production and the lack of US government subsidies made some sort of partnership necessity and so they went with emursive, a production company run by Randy Weiner, a playwright who helped to run the Box nightclub Arthur Karpati, whom Forbes described as a “real estate impresario” and Jonathan Hochwald the executive producer of Madison Square Gardens. Profit, he says, was not the motivating factor in bringing Sleep No More to New York or in joining with commercial partners. We would never do anything just for commercial gain. “We’ve been talking about it for years and we’re only able to do it because Absolut is giving us money to try it out. “The question for us is how can you tell a story using those little pixels, those dynamics?” he said. As an example, he discussed a project for Absolut Vodka that will explore the intersections of handheld gaming and live performance. “We only ever take on projects from commercial clients if we are going to try out R&D, ” he said. Photograph: Suppliedīarrett uses similar arguments about experimentation and research to support the company’s work for private clients like Stella Artois and Louis Vuitton.
Sleep No More: in Punchdrunk performances, the audience are masked. So now there are fewer, less formal theatrical accompaniments to the catering. Expense, he suggested, was also a factor. “How do you tell a story through food? How do you have a three-course meal that has a narrative?” Originally, Barrett had created a whole separate narrative for the restaurant with a separate 12-person cast, but in testing it he found “people weren’t ready to watch theater” while they ate. “What we’re doing with the bar and the restaurant are experiments, research,” he said. “It isn’t a franchise,” Barrett explained, speaking by telephone from London. Though the American producers oversee the day-to-day running of the show, someone from the Punchdrunk team is almost always in New York to assure quality control and the company is intimately involved in the creation of The Heath and The Lodge. Punchdrunk’s artistic director, Felix Barrett, who co-directs Sleep No More with the choreographer Maxine Doyle, prefers to see them as companion pieces to the experience, ways to further develop the Punchdrunk aesthetic. It’s tough to tell if the restaurant and roof bar are another way to cash in or just a means to keep the doors open. No one is particularly forthcoming about either the operating costs of the show, its profits, or the terms of the contract with Punchdrunk. And if anyone is, is that so terrible? Or is there a danger that a profit motive will dilute the work itself, a question Lyn Gardner asked almost a decade ago? It had an initial capitalisation of between $5m and $10m and operating costs that one of its American producers characterized as “a massive undertaking”. That said, it’s not entirely clear just how much anyone is profiting from Sleep No More. Where’s the line between experimental and entrepreneurial? We expect a merch table at a Broadway show – Aladdin has a whole bazaar – but there’s something less comfortable about a purportedly avant-garde work that looks to be cashing in, as Sleep no More does with its tie-in bars, its $20 souvenir programs aggressively flogged to departing guests. Photograph: Stephen Dobbie and Lindsay Nolin/Suppliedīut Sleep No More is also a case study of the relationship – sometimes cozy, sometimes uneasy – between art and commerce.
The piece continues to be markedly influential, sharpening New York’s interest in site-specific work and experiential events, a mild irony as the 1960s happenings that New York created seem a clear inspiration to Punchdrunk.Īn image from the 2009 launch performances.
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There are websites and blogs devoted to the show (and its ample nudity), as well as tributes on TV shows like Law & Order and Gossip Girl. The reviews – from critics and ordinary punters – are mostly ecstatic, and while the show’s American producers say, perhaps disingenuously, that they prepared for a run of only six weeks, Sleep No More doesn’t look like it’s closing any time soon. At each of the nine weekly performances, several hundred spectators (both Punchdrunk and the American producers, emursive, are oddly shy about giving precise numbers), who have paid between $75 and $170, not including cocktails, race around 100,000 square feet of space watching a wordless version of Macbeth as art-directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Since it opened in New York in 2011, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which shares premises with the Lodge and the Heath in a space known as the McKittrick Hotel, has become a theatrical sensation.
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