While You Sleep represents a culmination of several years’ work, and in my long-term collaborative practice with visual artist Sal Cooper, it is our largest and most ambitious work to date. While You Sleep premiered at Arts House in North Melbourne in 2018. It is a 50-minute deeply immersive and theatrical performance piece. In 2022 we will take the work to Canberra, Perth and Brisbane; first stop Canberra, for two performances at the Canberra International Music Festival.

While You Sleep

While You Sleep at this year’s Canberra International Music Festival. Photo © Bryony Jackson.

An aural and visual excursion into both the musical fugue and the psychological fugue-state, While You Sleep unites string quartet, piano, electronics, video and animation in a surreal counterpoint of music, movement and image. Exploring flight, escape, memory and dissociation, While You Sleep is both a contrapuntal experiment and escape from the present. Hand-drawn animation, live action, video and stop-motion are choreographed alongside the musicians on the stage.

Writing about While You Sleep in 2018, Dr Thomas H. Ford called it “a work of dizzying complexity” and said, “What we see and what...