The sleeping dancer. On choreography and sleep

“immunda somnia et immunda visione”
(apocryphal)

On the contemporary stage, one may encounter a sleeping dancer. They are not resting before or after exertion—they are already performing. It is a devised and operative performance: an immobile body, still in every detail, and in absolute silence. A body neither waiting nor announcing any imminent action or function. This is a voluntary stasis, disengaged from its surroundings and from the world. Through such force, as Kafka wrote, “the world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” In the background, Heraclitus’s fragment—“The awake share a common world, but the asleep turn aside into private worlds” (Fr. 89)—both questions the value of the oneiric experience and draws a parallel between the worlds of sleep and wakefulness.
            The act of “voluntarily letting oneself fall asleep” becomes a form of resistance—against movement and the immediate rewards of readability. It is a deliberate choice that rejects the showoff of technical mastery and offers new possibilities for action outside linear time. It may signal the return of the past as spectral memory; the “death of being, of the productive man” (Malevich); or a renunciation of omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence (a way of giving up God, perhaps?).
            Today, the international performance and choreographic scene presents a wide array of sleeping figures and gestures suspended in sleep: from Trajal Harrell’s Tickle the Sleeping Giant (2001-2012); to Maria Hassabi’s Plastic(2016) with bodies ‘thrown’ across the MoMA’s stairs; Alexander Vantournhout & Bauke Lievens’ Raphaël (2017); Boris Charmatz’s Somnole (2021), with its sleepwalking, whistling bodies; Helle Siljeholm’s The Mountain Body, Norangsdalen (2021); Cristina Kristal Rizzo’s Sonno (2021), where performers sleep in a glade among bushes and mosquitoes—as well as her Ultras. The sleeping dances, 2019, and Monumentum: The Second Sleep, 2022-2023; and Virgilio Sieni’s Sleep in the car (2024), where performers doze off on the seats of a vintage car driving through an urban space. As Hans Blumenberg reminds us, citing Goethe, “sleep is the extreme form of avoidance of reality, of the reduction of its demands, so as to protect an identity against history’s invasion of the protected sphere of a self-created life” (1985: 510).
            Today, dance is sleep. Historically, the act of sleeping echoes both the experience of somnambulism and the least passive state of hypnosis. Nineteenth-century dance offers several examples: La Somnambule ou l’arriveé d’un nouveau Seigneur by Jean-Pierre Aumer (1827); The Sleepwalker by August Bournonville (1829); and La belle au bois dormant by Jean-Pierre Aumer (1829). The more famous version of La belle au bois dormant, set to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score and choreographed by Marius Petipa, premiered in 1890. The title page of its literary source—Charles Perrault’s 1697 tale—suggests an erotic desire suspended between sleep and awakening. In Petipa’s ballet, the collective sleep that suspends the time of evil is captured in illustrations and studio photographs of Aurora’s bedroom scene in Act II. In one such image, Aurora lies immersed in sleep, surrounded by a slumbering royal court that fills the space and appears to await her awakening. At the edge of the scene, the Lilac Fairy (Maria Petipa) stands motionless, gazing toward the horizon. This tableau is emblematic: all the figures, except the Fairy, are caught in suspending gestures: leaning on their own elbows, resting on the lap of a nearby dancer, arms folded across their laps, standing with their heads tilted sleepily against a door, or with their heads dangling over one side.
            The centrality of the cataleptic experience in Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty must have strongly captured the audience’s imagination. Yet not everyone was impressed. Just two days after the premier, a review titled “The Balettomane’s Grief,” (Peterburgskaya gazeta, 5 January 1890) mocked the scene, stating: “In this alleged choreographic work, there is no plot whatsoever. It can be summed up in a few words: they dance, they fall asleep, and they dance again. They wake up and start dancing again. There is no twist, no development of the plot, no attempt to captivate the audience or involve them in the action."
            In George Balanchine’s The Night Shadow (1946), the protagonist’s narcoleptic state activates a seductive game, introducing a new level of erotic representation in ballet: somnophilia, or sleeping princess syndrome. Decades later, photographer Sophie Calle explored similar themes in her series Les Dormeurs | The Sleepers (1979), in which she invited friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people accepted her invitation. She photographed her subjects both awake and asleep, secretly recording their private conversations after the bedroom door shut. After serving each person a meal, and with their consent, she gave them a questionnaire to gather information about their personal preferences, habits, dreams, and thoughts on the act of sleeping in her bed. Her first exhibition in 1979 featured 198 photographs and brief texts. The artist book The Sleepers includes not only all the photographs and captions but also her own narrative of the experience—detailing how the sleepers arrived, conversed, slept, ate, and left. Their unique, often surprising and captivating stories merge, like an eight-day-long dream. In this work, as she observed the sleepers, they, in turn, observed her, creating a sense of mutual candor.
            In dance, Enzo Cosimi’s Hallo Kitty! (2002), inspired by Yasunari Kawabata’s novel The House of Sleeping Beauties (1972), is conceived for female performers only. This “brazen and deliberately depthless investigation” emphasizes sleep as a process of cultural feminization in contemporary Japan, addressing the colonization of lifestyles and modes of consumption, while also serving as a provocation and rebellion against paternal authority. In the Japanese context, Pawel Jaszczuk’s High Fashion (2018) is a photographic series capturing drunk white-collar workers asleep on the streets of Tokyo, taken during his stay there between 2008 and 2010. Initially published in a limited zine titled salaryman (2009), the images were later compiled into a glossy photo book. Rather than critiquing Japan’s drinking culture, Jaszczuk focuses on the striking contrast between the men’s model-like poses, their sharp attire, and the grimy streets, ultimately offering a darkly humorous and apocalyptic commentary on contemporary burnout society.
            In Gaetano Palermo’s recent performance The Garden (2024), a female body lies motionless on the ground, face down, her blond curls splayed out, and her arms extended along her sides. That’s all. This body is “immersed in a flow of soundscapes that continuously redefine it,” placing the responsibility for revising the performance’s dramaturgy on the audience. It’s the sleep of spectacle, the blind spot of vision, a disconnection from one’s own self, the death knell of representation, and an omen of liberation from the shadows of time and of insomnia. It’s about “seeing that you can’t see anything and there’s nothing to be seen,” or, as Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us, “without expecting to see the invisible.”
            According to Alexei Penzin, sleep represents an obstacle to the pragmatist values of modern capitalist societies—specifically productivity, efficiency, and rationality. In Western philosophical and political thought, sleep is often viewed negatively, as seen in Plato’s The Laws, where citizens, by sleeping, lose their connection to logos (reason) and to the body politic. As both Foucault and Deleuze have emphasized, modern power is sustained by relentless apparatuses of surveillance, control, and localization. The sleeplessness of power—its ceaseless vigilance—eventually comes to encompass society as a whole.
            Aristotle, instead, offers a positive conceptualization of sleep in On Sleep and Wakefulness, where sleep is not tied to logos but is understood as an integral part of the life process—a vital source of energy. Sleep, in this view, suspends human activity and replenishes it with new potential. Similarly, Emmanuel Lévinas sees sleep as essential to subject formation: a space of refuge and withdrawal from the pressures and brutality of the world. With a beautiful, kinetic metaphor, Lévinas links sleep to subjectivity, writing that our being is like baggage we drop each night when we fall asleep.
            In sleep, we are like “subjects without being,” yet we still exist in our potentiality, which forms the quiet, certain, and secret ground of our life.

We invite contributions for the special issue “The Sleeping Dancer: On Choreography and Sleep” of Mimesis Journal, focusing on dance and performance, and engaging with the themes outlined above as well as the topics and bibliography shared below. We encourage submissions that move beyond literal depictions or essentializing representations of sleep. The expected publication date is late 2026.

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) as a proposal by June 30, 2025, to mmelpignano@utep.edu and stomassini@iuav.it.

Upon acceptance, full articles will be due by February 1, 2026, in accordance with the journal’s editorial guidelines. All submissions will undergo peer review.

Topics:

• dance and politics of sleep
• ballet and poetics of sleep
• dance and hypnosis
• performance and sleep as/in revolt
• somnambulistic gestures
• sleeping postures
• sleeping figures
• dances/dancing in the dark
• narcoleptic movement
• phantasmatic vision
• dances at the limit
• choreographies of the inactive/unproductive
• choreographies of alterations
• choreographies of cathartic powers
• sleep and theatrical action
• choreographic stasis

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