Sweet Dreams
Playful, satirical and surreal, Sweet Dreams is our newest multi-sensory experience taking over AVIVA Studios at Factory International. The immersive multimedia narrative-driven show invites audiences to explore their place in the food chain wrapping big ideas about appetite and desire into a surreal pop package.
Sweet Dreams emerged from a fascination with the weirdness of food culture, with the dualities and hypocrisies and little self-justifying sweeteners we apply when it comes to food. As a species, we’ve never been more conscious of our connection to the natural world and the moral entanglement of our eating habits. At the same time, we live in a golden age of consumerism: never has so much been available to so many. Food is a status symbol, a social signifier, a reflection of our identities. Deeper down, it’s something that speaks to our lizard brains, to that pleasure principle always humming in each of us, our debt to desire.
Over the years, food companies and consumers have found ways to bridge these conflicting positions, perhaps the strangest of which is the food mascot, the smiling cartoon chicken between us and the plate of chicken which implies it approves of our eating it. It’s ridiculous. It’s grotesque. It works like a charm.
In the show, we join the Real Good Chicken company and its mascot, Chicky Ricky, at a time when tastes are changing. The company’s future, and Ricky’s, hangs in the balance. Ricky is forced to engage with the strange modern world of food and try to find a new place within it. To some extent, we’re all on the same path as Ricky, trying to navigate an increasingly loud and extreme landscape where food is becoming more processed and more expensive, and food habits more excessive. Where the margins of socially acceptable consumption have widened. (Twenty years ago, the UK had no food banks and no restaurants selling gold steaks.)
How we feel about food today speaks to a wider sense – and a deepening suspicion – that modern life is artificial, unsustainable, and not necessarily giving us what we need. There are no easy answers. Whatever choice some of us might have is complicated, and many have no choice at all. When it comes to food, large-scale co-operatives and multinationals shape not only our realities but our desires. We’ve been consuming other people’s dreams so long it’s hard to know what our own wishes are. Like our feathered friend Ricky, there’s much we can’t control. We’re all on the conveyor belt, but we might yet take back our dreams. The question is: what do we want? What do our sweet dreams look like?
Chicky Ricky, voiced by actor and comedian Munya Chawawa, and a glut of other characters – including shelved mascot Penny Peckish, voiced by comedian and impressionist Morgana Robinson and The Boss voiced by comedian Reggie Watts – takes audiences through a mesmerising blend of motion graphics, illustration, gaming and cinema that moves between the tantalising and the grotesque, the nightmarish and the hilarious.
Sweet Dreams holds a cartoon mirror on our world. MLF is serving up a story where audiences can deepen their connection to the food they eat. Aiming to spark further conversations about our place in the food chain, via chirpy cartoon faces that often are the gatekeepers to the things we consume.
Not shying away from big questions about food, consumerism and desire, audiences are guided through a dark yet playful story illustrated by renowned French artist McBess (Matthieu Bessudo). Throughout the 60-minute show, Sweet Dreams goes from decadent feasts to mass-produced mediocrity, with each scene offering a glimpse into the complexities of modern consumption, challenging audiences to confront their own relationship with food.
Employing a wealth of creative disciplines that span design, digital media, performance, puppeteering and sculpture, Sweet Dreams navigates audiences through new sensory perspectives. Incorporating online phenomena such as Mukbang ASMR and utilising cutting edge AI tools and motion capture technology, the show is the culmination of years of innovative work from MLF.
Commissioned by Factory International, developed and funded by the BFI’s Filmmaking Fund and created in collaboration with award-winning writer and former chef Simon Wroe, this playful new interactive artwork wraps big questions about how and what we consume into a comic, immersive pop package.
Sweet Dreams is the second collaboration between Factory International and MLF following Dream, a live online theatre show set in the midsummer forest of Shakespeare’s play ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.
DATES: 11 July – 1 September
The Warehouse, Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester, M3 4JQ