DREAM TIGERS

"We shall seek a third tiger. This Will be like those others a shape Of my dreaming, a system of words A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger That, beyond the mythologies, Is treading the earth. I know well enough That something lays on me this quest, Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on Seeking through the afternoon time The other tiger, that which is not in verse." - Jorge Luis Borges 

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DREAM TIGERS performing at Lobot Gallery for SALTA is Timeless, Infinite Light, photo credit: Chani Bockwinkel

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On January 29th, 2016, DREAM TIGERS were asked to participate in an event at the Lobot Gallery hosted by the Oakland-based small press Timeless, Infinite Light and SALTA, a dance/performance art group also based in Oakland. The event was called SALTA is Timeless, Infinite Light and a zine was put out specific to the evening, describing the event as:

“A collaboration between SALTA and Timeless, Infinite Light on an evening of collisions/communion between dance and poetry. We have invited poets who verge on dance, dancers who verge on poetry. and people working in some indefinable way between and among the two. This evening is largely composed of durational works, in which the audience can come, go, and move around as they wish. Throughout the event, a crew of local poets will be transcribing/translating the performances into language to be displayed on one of the gallery walls. A dance party to cap the vibes.” 

As for DREAM TIGERS, the performance “BODY/LANGUAGE” was a collaboration of mediums, namely text, movement, and drawing responding to one another:

“DREAM TIGERS will use their bodies, drawings, and words. We will build a kind of text. We will open ourselves up to the creative process and share it. Through reciprocity and translation, meaning can be made. This is a collaboration between two bodies and three mediums, an engagement with hybridity. An embrace of queerness. A process. This is a collaboration between the thinker and the spectacle. All witnesses are collaborators. Just as all collaborators are witnesses. We will attempt fluidity, not separation. Communication, not fragmentation. Ephemera, not product. Multiple, not one. We will create choice through trial, expansion through change. Diversified practice. Form as inclusive, reactionary. We will progress through history and repeat. We will continuously return, but will we arrive? We will strive to represent and to express ourselves. We will riff off of the immediate past into the immediate future, annihilate hierarchies. Equalize the modes. Transpose moments. Veer from stasis. We will write slippery sentences and lines that live fleetingly. We will play a beautiful game of telephone. Ever-present, ever-mercurial, like a thought.”

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In August 2015, Emergency Index published its 4th volume, with a contribution by DREAM TIGERS titled “CONVERSING UNDER A BLANKET WITH A PATCH OF SKY STUCK IN A MIRROR,” which chronicles their performance in November of 2014 at the Failure Festival in Boulder, CO:

“DREAM TIGERS sought to perform a conversation of failure within the context of the 2014 Failure Festival curated by HOARDED STUFF, who said of FF: “This is a celebration and an acknowledgment of the fact that when things inevitably don’t go as we plan, somehow, we must adapt.” We learned to adapt.

Just as a book begins with its Table of Contents, we listed and mapped out the arrangement of materials on the table for our performance. We considered what would go on top of the table, underneath it; what would be bagged, dropped, and discarded into a suitcase.

In preparing for the performance, we realized that the performance itself was in a continuous state of preparation. In this way we never began. We faced the paradox of the plan: how does one prepare to fail? Furthermore, how does one perform failure?

We set out to perform for 3 hours (the length of one festival night); the actual duration became closer to 5 hours in total. Recordings of previous conversations of failure were to play continuously throughout the performance. The disembodied voices became an object – a prop.

On the day of the festival, we were informed that we could no longer hold the space in the parking lot. This failure would precipitate the nature of the rest of the performance as a series of trials and errors. By eliminating that space, everything became our space.

Every thirty minutes a timer would go off and be restarted. We would announce “DREAM TIGERS WILL BEGIN IN 30 MINUTES,” while writing these words in charcoal on sheets of butcher paper. We would get undressed and redressed in front of mirrors. We became acutely aware of time within our bodies: it was only through duration and repetition that we were able to predict when the timer would go off.

We utilized a table with wheels - this meant that the demarcations of time were also demarcations of space. Time affected our mobility. For each increment, we mapped out a “station” on the periphery of the Madelife building where we would attempt to trace our shadows in charcoal: one of us would hold a floodlight while the other attempted to trace their silhouette.

The audience members initially participated before becoming the directive force of the performance. They decided our props were their props; they decided our bodies were props. The conversational aspect of the performance was abandoned in favor of direct interaction. A failure to be silent allowed the performance a voice of its own.

In the end the performance performed us. The performance of failure and planning to fail inevitably invites more failure. As if the performance could exist both inside and outside of a beginning, in a perpetual state of becoming.”

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July 2015: DREAM TIGERS at the City Park Jazz Festival in Denver, CO, performing notebook bibliomancies, collecting dreams and memories, translating them into drawings...