Sleeping Beauty is a participatory performance that approaches sexuality through power and role play. The performance offers an opportunity to carry out fantasies with a “sleeping” person. The participant can choose to be either the sleeper or the visitor, and bring along gears, accessories or props to one’s liking.
The performers will be present at the festival club where audience members can converse with them about their fantasies and the possibility of making them happen. When mutual understanding is met, the participant can purchase a ticket for the show and move into an intimate, calm space for the encounter.
Sleeping Beauty gives room to personal fantasies, sensations and feelings, and communication through touch. It invites the participant to step into the reality of the performance where power and surrender, trust and consent, curiosity and timidity, desires and fears, being seen and experiencing human beauty meet. The performance is queer-oriented and it welcomes all kinds of bodies, genders and sexual orientations.
Sleeping Beauty is part of the SexLab (2016–2017) initiative run by the performance collective Reality Research Center. The SexLab explores sexuality; its cultural manifestations, its diversity and possibilities, its limits and taboos – and, of course, sexuality in the performative context.
Reality Research Center, founded in 2001, is a collective of artists engaged in performative adventures. Their shared aspiration is to observe, question, and renew reality by creating performances. Most of their performances take place outside of traditional art spaces: in the woods, in offices, on the street, in boxing rings, in virtual reality, or in homes.
Concept: Julius Elo & Xana
Production: Reality Research Center / Annu Kemppainen
Reality Research Center is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the City of Helsinki.