Attending sideways, disoriented, in the dark: A dream that belongs to no-one

This co-authored article discusses Asa Horvitz’s three-hours long performance A Dream that Belongs to No-one (2021) as a generative experience of disorientation. The performance takes place as the sun is setting, in a big wooden space with glass windows. The audience is given a booklet with fragments of text that describe experiences of overwhelming streams of images, and sits around the sides of the space. Through a dramaturgy of a sideways moving attention that occurs while the night falls, two entangled experiences of disorientation are proposed: a pause in the dark that allows attention to drift; and a sense of falling into darkness that evokes groundlessness and instability. While in disorientation, the audience is immersed in cycles of dream-images that they are invited to wake up to, and to summon these as a way to reorient themselves.