Hold Me While I’m Dreaming at Kanuti Guild Hall

In December, Kanuti Guild Hall hosted a residency showing of Hold Me While I’m Dreaming, a co-created meditation on queer parenting and friendship by Marina Karpova and Ollie Hermansson. Tucked into the Püha Vaime Hall, the audience was invited to participate in questions and expressions of shared care in cross-generation community through shadow puppet play and self-examination. The event’s description offers the key conceit of the piece: the plants themselves are children in this exploration.

I arrived early, as is typical for me, and snagged a self-conscious drink from the bar before entering the performance space. With floor seating, tea, and oranges available to the audience, we were also greeted with an eclectically-set stage bearing pitchers of water, ropes and ladders, stools and a piece of wood strung to the ceiling with multiple lines, a cello, flashlights set out of the way on the wall, a table with spider webbing, and paper cutouts of potted plants. 

Friends and strangers filtered in, including one woman who had brought her parents – a delightful inversion of the theme, because queer parenting also requires parenting queer folks. As the audience gathered, the artist-performers sounded nervous and surprised that people turned up at all – I loved them immediately for this. They invited us to explore the stage and the small exhibition set on a ledge along the wall behind the scene, which documented the development process of this piece. 

Once we’ve settled onto our cushions on the floor, the artists introduced the piece, explaining that it was in English and had been in development for a month. Participation and movement were encouraged, with flashlights available for people who needed to move through the theatre during the performance. This is, they cautioned, quite literally “a dark show”. 

In the first scene, we watched as Ollie lied down to slumber at the rear of the stage and Marina silently approached the strung piece of wood, whose lines extended to the pipes of the ceiling, and paperclipped the paper plants to the strings. Lit only by cellphone light, the plants’ shadows cast on the far wall were shelved upon Ollie’s reclined form, lining up neatly next to one another as the strings themselves were invisible at that distance.

The second scene followed as Ollie rose and sat atop the ladder to begin telling a story about a fly in Tallinn who heard the cries for help of plants threatened by fire. Marina adjusted the illumination and puppeted the paper plants, then invited the audience to join the pantomime, using the empty glass pitchers to make a shadow play of watering the plants, quietly sharing them around. Ollie’s voice lifted into song as we worked together to share support and responsibility to help the plants grow.

In the third scene, Ollie was once again atop the ladder after resetting the lighting and gathering threads attached to a new set of paper plants, three sharing a pot. Marina brought the cello into action, from pizzicato to peaceful strokes, as the strings raised the plants into growth, an interplay of green and shadow. They were affixed to a rope hanging down from the ladder, and the metaphor stretched behind and ahead of us. 

Scene four began with a metronome being set, and the rituals of bedtime followed. Marina laid out a duvet, then carefully dismantled a pile of book to organise them neatly onto the blanket. Then, the ticking of the metronome counting the dim-lit moments away, Marina climbs beneath the duvet with the cello, settling them both into a semblance of sleep as the books all fell to the foot of the “bed”.

The final scene finally made use of the table set midstage, decorated with a shadow-spider in its web and two cords strung vertical and taut. Marina bows them gently, drawing out a two-note hymn as Ollie recites a poem-turned-mantra in this space, every day waking up to the fear of losing.

Stylised, methodic, metaphorical and dreamy, this exploratory performance drew connections across expectations and experiences in five scenes; through symbolism and intention we were asked: what do we share, what should we share, and what goes unseen? A gorgeous piece of cooperative art.

Author: Laurie

Laurie likes alliteration, ambiance, and lists with three things.