Between waking and sleeping

Sleep is a state that is familiar to all of us—and yet it remains mysterious. We spend about a third of our lives asleep, and yet we know surprisingly little about what happens to us during this time. In a society focused on productivity and control, even sleep is increasingly being measured, optimized, and monitored. But what happens when we withdraw from its control?

In the performance The Fall of Sleep, Montserrat Gardó Castillo and Petr Hastik, together with musicians Ted Gaier and Nicolás Kretz, create a poetic ritual dedicated to the state of mind between waking and sleeping. In a nocturnal setting where lullabies meet club echoes, sleep is celebrated as a fragile common good—as a quiet promise of another world. Ahead of the premiere on Thursday, November 20., we asked Montserrat Gardó Castillo three questions.

What tempted you to exploring the topic of sleep artistically?

The starting point was a personal experience. When we became parents two years ago, sleep became a central issue – not as rest, but as a field of negotiation. It revealed the fragility of rhythms, the interdependence between bodies, and the invisible nursing care. From there, we began to look at sleep beyond the domestic sphere: its regulation, its historical changes, and its role within biopolitics. In contemporary societies, even sleep is monitored, optimized, and capitalised. We became interested in the tension between sleep as a zone of resistance — where production pauses — and sleep as a mechanism of discipline.

At the same time, sleep seems to remain one of the last mythical elements within the secular body — a space where reason loses authority and the unknown persists. Artistically, we focused on the moment of falling asleep, the hypnagogic state, where perception fragments and consciousness drifts. It became a way to think about bodies that withdraw from function, and about imagination as a nocturnal, uncertain form of knowledge.

How is the connection between movement, sound, and text created in your work?

Although our background is in dance — we both studied at the conservatories in Prague and Barcelona and later at Folkwang UdK — our artistic practice has been interdisciplinary from the beginning. Collaborations with VA Wölfl/NEUER TANZ, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Tino Sehgal, Ben J. Riepe and Heiner Goebbels amongst others, shaped our understanding of performance as a space where different media meet. In our own works, we continue to develop this approach — combining choreography, sound, image, and text to create hybrid stage forms.
In The Fall of Sleep, this dialogue expands through our collaboration with musicians Ted Gaier and Nicolás Kretz, with whom we conceived the musical structure from the very beginning. The performers on stage share the same tools: movement, voice, sound, and language. These elements intertwine to convey both the ideas and the sensual experience of the piece. Once again, the spatial architecture, designed by Knut Klaßen and Jörn Nettingsmeier is central, creating an immersive environment in which the audience can drift into the atmosphere rather than merely observe it.

What can the audience expect from the Hypnagogic Club Session?

The Hypnagogic Club Session is conceived as a participatory format — flexible and adaptable to different contexts, spaces, and collaborators. It expands the universe of The Fall of Sleep, translating its ideas into a collective and more physically engaging experience. The focus is on the body and the senses, on the shared drifting through shifting states of perception and attention.
Participants are invited to drift, to lie down, to listen, and to let their perception shift. The session combines sound, voice, and subtle performative actions with deconstructed club music, creating a slow, immersive rhythm that unfolds over time. It is less about spectacle than about atmosphere — a collective descent into the hypnagogic. Each edition adapts to its environment and participants, turning sleep into a shared, unstable choreography between rest and awareness.

THE FALL OF SLEEP

THU 20. – FR 21.11. + SU 23.11.
FFT, Bühne II

The Fall of Sleep at FFT
HYPNAGOGIC CLUB SESSION at FFT
Montserrat Gardó Castillo among our Partners of Crime