What dreams are made of is a question that has occupied the minds of people since the beginning of civilisation. It has also been occupying the minds of 17 young actors from Long Cloud Youth Theatre as part of the devised work Oneironaut.

Loosely translated this means dream traveller, and in this work, which is almost indescribable and to do so would also take away a lot of the surprises of the production, the performers have  accessed their dreams and devised them into a performance piece which they take the audience with them on a journey through time and space.

Presented in the form of promenade theatre, the venue at Whitireia Performing Arts Centre has been divided up into various rooms and the audience, in small groups, travel through each.  Watching the performances is probably not an apt way to describe this piece as the audience, in moving from space to space, experiences through observation and interaction, the thoughts and ideas that have evolved through the creation process.

As everyone knows, dreams never have a beginning or an end, and they are often vivid and quite startling. So with these pieces, although not initially appearing to have anything to do with dreams, they slowly evolve into what could well be dream like sequences, and sleep is certainly mentioned in a number of times throughout the production.

Recent devised works from Long Cloud Youth Theatre have been somewhat esoteric and self-indulgent and while there are elements of these in this production, there is enough quirkiness and intrigue to hold the audience’s attention.

And it is obvious that with this work the process has been as important as the final product not only in exploring a fascinating part of our psyche, our dreams, but also the way these can be expressed theatrically.

Under the direction of Stella Reid the actors have used their imaginations to delve deep into their psyche exploring the myriad of dreams each has experienced and from that devised what can only be described as a fascinating piece of theatre and one, while not necessarily being to everyone’s taste, is nevertheless worth seeing.

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Oneironaut, we are informed, is a modern portmanteau from Greek words meaning ‘dream’ and ‘traveller’. The show is hence subtitled The Dream Traveller. More correctly of course nautēs would be sailor, with the -naut endings of astronaut, aeronaut, aquanaut and oneironaut producing respectively, star sailor, air sailor, water sailor and dream sailor. 

But whether we enter the work as a sailor or a traveller is probably of little significance. This is an astonishingly beautiful piece of theatre that is as poetic as the notion of ‘dream sailing’, and the slow and eloquent poetry of the work has been, to me, the hallmark stamp of Long Cloud’s productions over the years.

This is Stella Reid’s first time directing alone for Long Cloud, and while the company itself is constantly in a flux of cast members and collaborators, it still carries with it the legacy of what has come before, so while I have never seen any of the current cast on stage before, this piece is still very much and very strongly a Long Cloud Youth Theatre work. In fact, for me, the lack of familiarity with any of the cast – something that is increasingly hard for me to experience in Wellington – adds further to the dreamlikeness of the story. 

Without wanting to give too much of the many lovely surprises away, the show is in promenade and consists of several different stories with interconnecting elements and themes that can be viewed in no particular order and yet still form a cohesive and coherent whole (inasmuch as the logic of dreams is cohesive and coherent). 

Not everyone is prone to having such epic dreams every night, packed with intense imagery and strange dialogue, but as someone who does experience such dreams on a very regular basis, this show resonates with me deeply. Of course the dream scientists always tell you that you’re never dreaming for longer than three or four minutes, but I cannot believe this when every morning, on waking, I can fill pages and pages with hours worth of description and detail and action that have taken place in the night.

In real time, this play is around ninety minutes. How long that feels to the average audience member with this strange suspension of time that seems to happen in some of the sequences, I don’t know. Perhaps a dream scientist would tell me the play was only four minutes long. I certainly felt half asleep throughout it.

Clever techniques are used to give the audience the experience of different dream ‘deliveries’: there is the kind of dream you are actively a part of; the kind of dream you are a mere observer to, unable to interact with anything that is happening; the kind of dream where you are observing yourself; the sorts of dreams that suddenly somehow switch and become a second dream and yet manage to do so fluidly. 

I highly reccommend seeing Oneironaut, particularly if you are a sensitive indie kid who likes wistful music (original score by i.ryoko and Seth Frightening) and expressionist poetry or surrealism; particularly if you have a very vivid and active dream life; particularly if you like movies like Being John Malkovich, and Magnolia; if you are a fan of Michel Gondry (and I’m not); if you enjoyed Death and the Dream Life of Elephants; if you are a Long Cloud fan … and particularly if you know none of the 30+ people involved in production and would otherwise have no reason to see the show. But I would also recommend it even if not.

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