Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Dreamscapes is a multimodal theater project on addiction co-created by anthropologists, theater educators, and lay actors. It stages addiction as a human experience that unsettles binaries between expert/lay, addict/non-addict, and audience/performer through participatory, reflective formats.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents Dreamscapes, a multimodal theater production on addiction currently co-created by anthropologists, theater educators, and a cast of ten lay actors, including participants from earlier ethnographic research at a rehabilitation center in Vienna. Drawing on “dreamscapes” (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010) – enticing architectures of consumption historically shaped by stagecraft from the 19th-century onward – the piece reframes addiction not as a matter of unruly brains but as a profoundly human experience embedded in commercial, political, and sensory landscapes.

Staged as a hybrid of walking, audio installations, and station theater through Vienna’s 19th century Wurstelprater amusement park, the performance mobilizes theater as a “third space” (Bhabha, 1990), inspired by forum theatre (Boal, 1989), where audiences can intervene in the process. Co-creation invites people with lived, diverse experience of addiction to alcohol, opioids, slot machines, or digital media to engage with ethnographic materials and generate new narratives, thus underlining the commonalities of human experience and unsettling pathologizing othering of “addicts”.

Methodologically, the work embraces multimodality: sound and lighting evoke sensory logics of consumption; loops mirror relapse; interactive formats and digital elements invite participation before, during, and after the performance; and a reflection space gathers responses. Dreamscapes questions who counts as an “addict” and what constitutes “expertise,” playfully unsettling boundaries between artists and audiences, and between those affected and unaffected. It foregrounds nuance – rupture, contradiction, and ambivalence – while using theater’s capacity to shift roles and blur reality and fiction to express embodied experiences that are otherwise difficult to communicate.