A Dozen Dreams
Visual and Environment Designer
Part art installation, part immersive theater, A Dozen Dreams invited spectators to experience the pandemic dreams of a dozen NYC female playwrights. The performance took over a 4,500 square foot retail space within the Brookfield Place luxurious mall, along with parts of its spacious Winter Garden lobby. A Dozen Dreams, performed entirely without live actors, featured twelve unique rooms that used sets, light, sound, video, and projection to create detailed worlds that palpably expressed the wildly varied dreams. The first few environments of the unfolding narrative progression were designed to be smaller and more tactile and personal, correlated to the dreams reflecting the early days of the quarantine. As the dreams progressively opened up, so did the spaces. A different energy was introduced: the energy of hope, future and optimism. This spatial dramaturgy took the audience on a journey from disorientation to darkness to a hopeful reemergence into the light.
“Kruzhilina has transformed a warren of bare spaces into a dungeon of expressive dreamscapes”
-Jon Sobel, Blogcritics.org
“a captivating patchwork of memories, reveries, and wishes — and it’s impossible to guess what fantastical world you’ll encounter next”
-Maya Phillips, the New York Times
“truly enchanting production design of Kruzhilina”
– Brittany Crowell, Front Row Center
“extraordinary designs find visual analogues for the playwrights’ evocative musings on memory, motherhood, race, sex, disease, and dreams of both the waking and sleeping variety”
-Rob Weinert-Kendt, American Theatre Magazine
“Though the rooms are beautifully designed and lit, each a self-contained universe, the experience of being in them is simultaneously intimate and disembodied—it seems as if you’re inside the speakers’ heads, yet they remain closed off”
-Elisabeth Vincentelli, the New Yorker
“a lovely and deep-spirited installation….designer Irina Kruzhilina has interpreted each one as its own elaborate interior — each room like a Cornell box you walk through”
– Helen Shaw, Vulture
Creative Team
Co-Conceived and Created by
Anne Hamburger, John Clinton Eisner and Irina Kruzhilina
Produced by
En Garde Arts
Sound Designer
Rena Anakwe
Video | Projection Designer
Brittany Bland
Lighting Designer
Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Associate Scenic and Environment Designer
Abby Smith
Prop Designer
Jessica Sovronsky
Location
Brookfield Place, New York, 2021