Close Your Eyes

About

Close Your Eyes is a contemporary dance work by Samir Akika and Unusual Symptoms. It takes cinema and dreams as its point of departure, including the idea that a film can resemble a lucid dream: irrational and confused, yet temporarily experienced as real. Akika transfers his interest in cinema and its images into dance. Dance works with image architectures that may not be immediately decipherable while remaining physically and visually forceful. Cinema, dance, and dreams place images against reality and offer another perspective on it. The production uses distorted dream images to ask whether such images can describe a reality obscured by an excess of technically produced representations. It combines dance, cinematic illusion, dream imagery, stage design, video, costumes, lighting, and live music.