What happens when we sleep? Do we drop into a deep, dark sleep? Does the brain re-live the events, the anxieties and pleasures of the day? Do we remember the themes and pathways of our sleep?

Fair to say that every member of the audiences at this CIMF presentation could identify with at least some of the dimensions raised in the intermedia theatre work While You Sleep, a collaboration by interdisciplinary artist Sal Cooper and composer/sound artist Kate Neal. We all experience the disorderly process of sleep, the random disconnectiveness of the elements of our sleep, the frustration at not being able to summon clear recall of the elements of sleep. And do we ever get enough sleep?

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

While You Sleep explores these elements, and more, through an interrogation of the Fugue (literally, ‘fuga’ = flight). Even non-musicians can follow the orderly process of Bach’s monumental 48 Preludes and Fugues, “an expression of ordered precision and complexity,” as Cooper and Neal explain them. But few of us recognise the Fugue in its other guise:...