The Dreaming

The Dreaming is a one-woman performance about fertility and the eroticisation of pregnancy. The audience enters to Althea Young, asleep atop of a corrugated-plastic box, surrounded by a series of voyeuristically-arranged mirrors. It looks somewhere between a dressing room and a strip joint. When she wakes, she tells us about her childhood desire to become pregnant, before she had any understanding of what sex was.

The material is deliberately uncomfortable. Her desire for pregnancy becomes tangled with her desire for men, before the fantasy moves into a park where she looks at babies through the language of sexual jealousy and flirtation. “I see you. You’ve got a different woman around your arm every time.” The comparison is cleverly constructed, but deeply uncomfortable: babies become the object of the same craving and possessiveness that she elsewhere applies to men. There is no laughter from the audience.

The performance moves through a series of fantasies and anxieties, with movement, voice and music taking over from the text at various points. A cheap radio microphone is used to create another voice, but the delay between the live voice and the amplified one makes the effect feel cheap too. The box functions as a bed and changing space, but the corrugated plastic and metal frame look flimsy beside the ideas being explored.

Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” is slowed into something eerie and apposite, while the lighting often becomes appropriately sickly. In one fantasy, pregnancy turns almost clinical as Young’s body is imagined as a specimen, with an alien abduction and impregnation thrown into the mix. It is another striking image, though by this point the hyperbole is beginning to feel like its own destination.

The fears and fantasies keep multiplying. Fertility, sex, pregnancy, motherhood, intimacy and the desire for another person keep circling back in different forms. Sometimes the dial is turned too far into hyperbole for its own sake.

The Dreaming is reaching for something profound about these contradictions. Some of them are genuinely interesting. Too often, though, the choices fall short of the mark.

The Dreaming by Hacks. Credit Ross Fraser Mclean.