Episode 06: The art of sleep
In this episode: Joshua and Cressida meet Danielle Drees, scholar of performance studies. Why is there so much sleep in feminist art of the last fifty years? Images of sleeping women are part of the story, but sleep also provides a different way of knowing. Why is it gripping to watch sleep? (14:00). Conversely, what’s interesting about sleeping during art? (20:03). Danielle explains the logics of capitalism and care (27:53), and how sleep can interrupt the flow of capital (35:33). Joshua starts a conversation about the politics of feelings (42:37). Disability activists and artistic encounters show us how to embrace rest for liberation! (50:41) Danielle tells us about her favourite piece of sleep-related performance art (53:33), and her own sleep story (55:20).
Mentioned in this episode: Thumbnail image is of Tracy Emin’s “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963-1995);” more about Danielle Drees and her forthcoming book Sleep with Spectators can be found at danielledrees.com; the “theatrical experience” “Sleep No More” (2011); Washington Irving, “Rip van Winkle” (1819) (full text); an example of an “oracular woman;” a great explainer on Tracy Emin’s “My Bed” (1998); Tilda Swinton, “The Maybe” (1995); again with Sam Taylor-Wood, “David Beckham (‘David’)” (2004) (full video); Andy Warhol, “Sleep” (1964); Max Richter, “Sleep;” Laurie Anderson demonstrates her “pillow speaker;” remember when Teen Vogue was awesome? Once more with feeling, their review of “Black Power Naps;” David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (2018); Sakiko Yamaoka, “Best Place to Sleep;” James Maas, the sleep researcher who coined the term “power nap,” died in June 2025; Caryl Churchill’s plays, “Three More Sleepless Nights” (1980) and “Fen” (1983);” Regina José Galindo, “America’s Family Prison” (2008); Ann Cvetkovitch, Depression: A Public Feeling (2012); Audre Lorde on self-care again; Peggy Shaw’s brilliantly-titled play “Menopausal Gentleman” (1996); and Samantha Harvey, A Shapeless Unease (2021).
Transcript Danielle: 00:00
Sometimes it's like meeting the bear where you're supposed to like make a big show of yourself. Like if you look bigger than the actor dramatically, then they'll get scared and back off.
Cressida: 00:11
Haha! Serves you right, actors!
Joshua: 00:31
Today we're talking to Danielle Drees, scholar of performance studies, about how sleep features in drama and art.
Cressida: 00:38
There's a surprising amount of sleep in both theater and in performance art, and you wouldn't think it because surely sleep is kind of boring. Although I hope this podcast is showing that that is not true.
Danielle: 00:52
My name is Danielle Drees, and I'm a writer and researcher in the field of performance studies, specifically feminist and trans queer theater and performance art.
Joshua: 01:03
And Danielle has a book on this topic coming out next spring.
Danielle: 01:06
The book is called Sleep with Spectators, and my website, which is danielledrees.com, has a sign-up if you'd like to be notified when the book goes on sale.
Cressida: 01:17
So Danielle's work is specifically about feminist performance art of the last 50 years, which is since the so-called second wave of feminist activism in the global north in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Danielle: 01:34
For the past almost a decade, I've been trying to figure out why there is so much sleep in feminist theater and performance art since about 1970.
Cressida: 01:44
Great question.
Danielle: 01:46
It's totally unexpected that it's there. You wouldn't think that sleep would be a good subject for theater at all. It sounds so boring. And shows don't usually want people to fall asleep while they're watching them. But about a decade ago, I went to see this kind of immersive performance where you had to run around after the actors. And it was like...
Cressida: 02:08
That sounds terrible!
Danielle: 02:09
It was, it was exhausting. And I kept like getting in the actor's way accidentally and then being moved aside.
Cressida: 02:16
I have to say, anyone who's ever invited me to do any kind of audience participation has rued it. Yes. They have thought, uh-oh, we shouldn't have got that woman involved.
Danielle: 02:26
Yeah, it brings out our contrarian natures.
Cressida: 02:29
Exactly. Yeah.
Danielle: 02:30
And that's what happened to me as a researcher. Like it was called, it happened to be called Sleep No More, which is a quote from a line from Macbeth. But what it made me think was like, I want to be sitting, I want to be relaxed. I want to be like in my leisure time. I kind of want to be sleepy. And so it made me wonder if there were sort of opposite kinds of performance, like performances that were looking for sleep, that were willing to relinquish some attention from the audience to engage with thinking about sleep and rest and relaxation. And that's what started this project for me.
Cressida: 03:04
Yeah, that's a great origin story. I was going to ask you a bit sarcastically if you think that it's just because feminists are really tired that, you know, it's like, like Nietzsche said, you know, everything the philosopher writes is an involuntary and unconscious memoir. And I wonder if it's a sort of, you know, I'm really tired, so maybe I'll make a show about sleep?
Danielle: 03:25
I kind of do think that's part of it. Also, just putting on a show is itself exhausting. Like you're in these like 12-hour rehearsals right before you go into tech. And, there's this great story about the playwright Irene Fornes, and she was directing a show when someone came in at the end of the day and just found her asleep under the rehearsal table. Like she had just stayed in the space forever and was sleeping there. It reflects like a practical kind of tiredness, I think.
Cressida: 04:03
So, what makes this art feminist is that it takes women's lives to be worthy of representation and political critique. But also, I think something a bit more general, which is that gender relations are worth commenting on in some way through art. And sometimes this is very direct, speaking about gender, and sometimes it's about speaking about things that gender is connected to. So it's sort of triangulating gender. And the reason I started off by saying that sleep is a bit boring is that performance is often about watching other people do things. And you might think that while written stories about in which people sleep, like the fairy tales that we've mentioned before, or even a classic story that I think we haven't mentioned, like Rip Van Winkle, which is a sort of little short story classic of American literature, sometimes they just put in a sentence or two for the sleeping part, you know, like he fell asleep and then he woke up 50 years later. Right. So you don't have to represent the sleep except through very brief linguistic insertions, right?
Joshua: 05:07
Yeah.
Cressida: 05:08
So if we're talking about performance and watching people on a stage or in an art gallery sleep, then it's real time and that risks being dull. But maybe, maybe even that has an allure.
Joshua: 05:20
Yeah, I think it's a subject that will come up again or has come up already in the series. This question of how political can sleep be, because we think about sleep as being very inactive, as being completely absent, especially from political life. And so this question about, well, if you're talking about the politics of sleep, isn't that just a form of quietism? Seems very connected to me to any biases we would have about watching sleep or sleep as a performance art. It doesn't seem like much would be happening or that it would be very interesting to watch, the same way that it might not seem like an inherently political activity to do sleep. And yet, there are these fascinating pieces of art that use sleep to say something really interesting. And I would say, and hopefully throughout this podcast series, it will have been clear. The same goes for the relationship between sleep and politics. There is something going on with sleep that has political significance and that can be represented in these really interesting art pieces.
Cressida: 06:37
Let's hope so.
Joshua: 06:38
Let's hope so. That's the gambit!
Cressida: 06:52
So as you say in your writing, it seems really odd to watch sleep in performance art because it's not very narratable, it's not very entertaining. And yet, you as you also say, there's tons of sleep in art. So why do you think that is?
Danielle: 07:13
Well, there's a long tradition of images of sleeping women in art, this sort of like sleeping beauty legacy. And that's been pretty thoroughly sort of skewered by feminist critics as the most extreme version of this gender binary in Western art history, where men are the active painters and viewers, they're doing stuff, and women are the passive objects who get looked at. And like it's even better if you can look at a woman who doesn't look back at you because she's asleep. It's like an ideal passive object. So I think one reason that so much sleep starts to show up in performance art is that it's a kind of response to this gender tradition of like viewing the passive woman. And performance artists want to speak back to that. But then there's also this other interesting thing, which is sleeping women in art can also have other meanings. Like there are these very old sort of Central European little statues or sculptures that are meant to be like oracular women sleeping, like oracles, and in their sleep it's like a trance-like state, and through it they have the power to see things the rest of us can't. So I think on the one hand, we can see sleep and performance art as this like critique of a masculinist tradition, but it can also just be a way of exploring like different ways of knowing, different ways of accessing the world, other than through sort of like looking at it directly with our awake minds.
Cressida: 08:38
Interesting. What do the oracular women look like?
Danielle: 08:43
They sort of, to me, as a non-historian of like the ancient world, they look sort of like the fertility figure sculptures. They're sort of nice rounded bodies, like a lot of ancient women's sculptures.
Cressida: 08:56
Are they lying down asleep?
Danielle: 08:57
Yes, yeah, reclined or supine.
Cressida: 08:60
Oh, okay. I'm gonna have to look that up. We'll have to find a picture of one such for the website. So in your work, you discuss lots of examples. So maybe, maybe let's go there. You open your book's introduction with a description of Tracy Emin's favorite installation, "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963 to 1995." Emin is also famous for "My Bed," of course, another installation. Can you describe that now no longer existent, tragically, artwork to us, and tell us what you conclude about it?
Danielle: 09:37
Yes, so everyone I have ever slept with, it also gets called "The Tent," and it's because it's like a small portable nylon camping tent that Emin spent a winter embroidering with the names of everybody she had ever slept with, meaning here, like next to or alongside. So lovers and partners, but also her grandmother, two pregnancies she had terminated. It really is this like capacious record of her social life of sleep made out of an object of sleep. But the title is sort of it's an intentional double meaning, and it was really shocking to people. It was read originally by critics as being just this list of sexual partners. And Emin was already known for being kind of a shocking woman. So that was just part of her story. But I think it asks us to slow down and take a second look at how social sleep is, how much all of our sleep is part of a network of everyone who's ever watched over us while we sleep, slept beside us, cared for us as we sleep. And I imagine that if you could go inside the tent, it would actually be this really quiet, like peaceful space where you could lie down on the blanket in the center and look at that this history of Emin's sleep. None of us can go inside the tent anymore. So this tent was displayed in the 1990s. It was purchased by Charles Saatchi who's an art collector in London. Uh, he's also one of the advertisers who helped bring Margaret Thatcher into power.
Cressida: 11:08
I remember. I was there!
Danielle: 11:11
I'm sure that was traumatic.
Cressida: 11:13
Yes, it was actually.
Danielle: 11:14
Yeah. So he buys it, and the tent eventually goes into an art warehouse, which is what happens to a lot of contemporary art. And then in 2003, overnight that warehouse burns down. There's a huge overnight fire. Fire services aren't able to get to it in time. And Emin has never recreated the project. And so for me with the book, this has become this sort of fable about how dependent we are in sleep on others to take care of us, both individual people and infrastructures. And the sort of overnight fire speaks to that. And of course, like losing an art piece in a fire is nothing compared to losing people to fire, which is one of the things that people risk when they're living in the worst housing or in cities that have stopped investing in in our safety and our infrastructures.
Cressida: 12:02
Yeah. You also say that the tent intervenes in the distinction that you just drew between the sleeping, the sleeping woman and the male viewer that men are making art about sleeping women. Can you just make that connection? How does that link to the tent?
Danielle: 12:20
Yes. So I think straightforwardly in one way, you cannot see all of the names embroidered, appliqued, into the tent walls unless you were to climb inside the tent. So you don't get to be a distanced viewer who just looks on at the artwork. You have to sort of put yourself into the situation of this sleeper. And it never gives you the image of Emin herself. It's always the social world surrounding her, more than one sort of vulnerable, beautiful woman sleeping in front of us.
Cressida: 12:50
Yeah. And "My Bed" is also like that. I mean, that's sort of contemporaneous with "Everyone I've Ever Slept With." And think "My Bed" is '98. In that, you see her bed, you know, but sort of reconstructed for an installation, but it's a very messy bed.
Danielle: 13:07
Yeah, and there's condoms and tampons and tissues, and yeah, it's covered with stuff.
Cressida: 13:12
Yes, surrounded by stuff that's sort of been thrown off the bed or fallen off the bed, but there's no person involved. So, in a way, the sleeping, if there's a sleeping figure, it's the bed itself, I suppose. Yeah. So you just imagine Tracy asleep on her bed or doing whatever in her bed, but she's not actually there. So some performance art is about watching people sleep. And sometimes that's, as you've said, a kind of voyeurism, a kind of very gendered voyeurism. So in fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, that we've talked about elsewhere on the show. But sometimes it's maybe the attraction of celebrity. So I'm thinking of Tilda Swinton's "The Maybe," which I don't know if that's very interesting, but it's Tilda Swinton asleep in a box in an art gallery. Or Sam Taylor-Wood's "David." So that short film of David Beckham sleeping that shows on a on a loop. And so it doesn't have to be watching women. So people lined up, I'm told, to watch David Beckham asleep. And then there's Andy Warhol's classic, right? His much longer film of his lover John Giorno asleep. So why is it gripping or maybe not to watch sleep?
Danielle: 14:34
Well, with the celebrity examples you give, it seems like voyeurism sort of pushed to the extreme that we're getting access to this intimate private experience. Yeah. Although I do think that's one of the things that's interesting about sleep performance in general, is we don't normally watch people sleep. Only your child, partner, or roommate. It is actually creepy generally to watch people sleep. So we don't, I think in some ways it makes it sort of out of sight and out of mind. But when you actually are encouraged to watch someone sleep because there's a sort of artistic frame around it, you might notice things about their sleep. And in particular in theater, sleep like animates all these other kinds of relationships. Now there's everything that happens around a sleeping person. This is often most familiar to people from Shakespeare. There are tons of sleep scenes in Shakespeare where, like in Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania goes to sleep and suddenly a man with the head of an ass shows up and they have a whole interaction. Or in Macbeth, the king goes to sleep and he gets murdered and the Macbeths take off. So I think what is gripping is getting to see a part of everyday life that we actually never look at other than performance.
Cressida: 15:45
Yeah. And in those examples, it provides an opening, doesn't it, for a kind of narrative twist. Like most obviously, this has suddenly become a dream, like you're watching a dream sequence.
Danielle: 15:56
Yes. And that's probably the most written about version of sleep and performance is dream sequences. So one thing that's been interesting for me with the project is trying to find what else beyond dream and beyond a sort of Freudian approach to reading dream in theater and literature, you can do with sleep.
Cressida: 16:13
Yeah, totally get it. I've stayed clear of dreams just because I think it's the easiest part of sleep to talk about. It's not easy at all to talk about dreams, but it's easier than the other bits in some ways.
Joshua: 16:35
So I have a sense of "The Tent," but can you say a bit more about "My Bed"? The other art installation by Emin?
Cressida: 16:48
Yeah, so for those people who haven't seen it, and I'm sure we can link to an image on the website, the bed of "My Bed" is very unmade, very messy. Stuff spills off the bed onto the side of the bed, including condoms, dirty underwear, a large number of empty vodka bottles, packs of cigarettes, and a lot of cigarette butts in ashtrays, because Amin was both a heavy drinker and a heavy smoker at the time. Pregnancy tests, packets of contraceptive pills, crumpled up tissues, discarded pair of tight, all sorts of crap, really. And there are also ordinary items like a stuffed toy, there's a cup of tea, there's a pair of slippers that it looks like she's just sort of stepped out of. And the origin story of the artwork is that she had had a really bad breakup, and then she went on a bit of a bender, and then she ended up spending several days being very depressed in bed, during which time she, I guess, drank a lot of vodka and amongst other things, and smoked a lot and you know, all this sort of stuff. So it's a slice of her life from which she is absent. Although I suppose we could say that the bed itself is a sort of sleeping figure, you know, that the person isn't in the bed, but the person is in the bed, because all of this stuff that tells us about the person is in the bed. And when it was first shown in 1998, it was sort of part of the Young British Artists movement of the time that featured a lot of these kind of ready-mades, you know, like ordinary objects that are themselves art. And things like showing your sheets with menstrual bloodstains on them was like not kosher. Yeah. You know, so it was more transgressive then than I think it would be read now by people who are coming to this for the first time. And it was very much the inverse of what we talked about in the Working from Bed episode. So there we talked about how there was all this advice, right, about how if you're going to show your bed in public, i.e. on Zoom, what you have to do is you have to keep it perfectly clean, you have to have a very neutral duvet, it must be smoothly made, it should look as little like a bed as possible, remove anything personal from the camera view, even though it is your private space and your bed, make it suitable for public consumption. But I thought, good old Tracy Emin, she's done the exact opposite in 1998, where she took the worst working from bed scene that you can possibly imagine, and she put it in the middle of an art gallery and made it completely public. So it's a public bed that is the messiest side of being human, but also of being a human woman that you can possibly imagine. It provokes disgust. I mean, I know that people at the time said that they were really disgusted by it, but Emin is really good at sort of just giving the middle finger to shame and saying, I refuse to be ashamed. And so that's what I continue to like about that installation.
Cressida: 20:04
I have a sort of converse question, which is what's artistically interesting about sleeping during art? And the reason I ask this is because in London a couple of weeks ago there was the 10-year anniversary performance of Max Richter's "Sleep," it's just called, and they filled up Alexandra Palace with beds, and you had to pay like a lot of money to go and get a bed, and it's an overnight performance, and there's all sorts of things happen. I'm told there's music and you're invited to journal and whatever. But basically, you show up at a giant venue and you have a night's kip in a bed, and my friend went and I said to her, It's a lot of money. Do you want to pay like 200 quid for what's going to be a crappy night's sleep? She thought I was very, you know, a Philistine of the worst order. But, there's a deeper question there, which is what's interesting as an audience member, I guess, about sleeping through some part of an artwork.
Danielle: 21:10
I'm always interested in how people find those experiences. I've never done the Richter one, but I read reviews of them and I talk to people. And often it sounds like being on a long haul flight. Like you have to hear the snoring, you're too close to people. Like, you know, you're not as uncomfortable, but it's not, we're really used to sleeping with only like one or two other people around. I think in some ways, that kind of performance, it's chasing the same thing as the immersive performances where you have to run around, which is like a real kind of novelty of experience. The thing you're there for is your unique experience as a spectator more than the artwork itself. I'm sure it's better to just listen to Richter and get to enjoy a part of the piece than to fall asleep during it. Many of the pieces, performances like that, claim they can also influence your dreams or like put you to sleep better. So maybe there's something too about just the feeling that people don't sleep very well. Right. The hope of a novel experience of really good sleep. But it's kind of wild to me that these performances think that like every person would want the same thing to sleep well.
Cressida: 22:18
Yeah.
Danielle: 22:19
Like identical kinds of bed, one identical performance, and we'll all sleep the same way. I'm not actually sure that that is true for us when we're looking for a really good night's sleep.
Cressida: 22:30
Yeah, it seems definitely not true. And maybe they're just kind of putting their best foot forward because they're giving you nice... the bed linens looked really nice in the photos. Like they were snazzier beds than I was expecting.
Danielle: 22:42
They often do manage to get sponsorship for you, might need sponsorship. I mean, to put together 200 beds or whatever, you can use a bedding company to get in there.
Cressida: 22:52
Yeah, and that's one of my questions because you also say that sleep is often commercialized. So we're being sold products that are designed to improve our individual sleep. So in this podcast and in the literature, there's talk about the sleep crisis, you know, which I love for its kind of serious... it sounds so serious, the sleep crisis, wherein we're all sleeping really badly and we're encouraged to think of our sleep as our own, right? Your sleep belongs to you, it's not shared. But another sort of solution to the alleged sleep crisis is to try and create mutual support networks with the goal of enabling more and better rest. That's a distinction that you draw. So, do you think that the artworks that you analyze are pointing us towards that mutual shared solution?
Danielle: 23:39
Yeah, and in different ways. Like one that I like because it's so tongue-in-cheek is a Laurie Anderson piece called "Pillow Speaker." And this comes from sort of an earlier era of sleep technology where there was a company that made language learning tapes. So you would put this speaker in your pillow and you would learn German while you were sleeping because the tape would just like play in your ear all night.
Cressida: 24:02
Oh, blimey. Okay.
Danielle: 24:04
And Anderson in like the 1970s, I think, takes this speaker out and changes the recording to be herself playing the violin and then pops it in her mouth in performances so she can like change how much of the speaker you hear by moving her mouth around. She has this joke about how it's like exciting that you could get electrocuted while doing this.
Cressida: 24:26
I love Laurie Anderson.
Danielle: 24:28
Yeah. And she's great at like sort of mocking technology effectively. So that's one way of sort of like critiquing the ways we could optimize our individual sleep. But then there's also pieces like a much more recent piece called "Black Power Naps," which is by Navild DaCosta and Fanny Sosa, where they try to specifically create beds that will be really comfortable and safe for Black and Indigenous Americans. And they're thinking about not like what's the best bedding anyone can have, but what are the experiences people have had that might make them uncomfortable sleeping, especially sleeping in an art gallery? And how do we make beds that respond to that? So, for example, there's one that's sort of aimed at the immigrant experience where it's like a pool of dried black beans and those like metal blankets, those blankets that are supposed to keep you warm when you're in dangerous outdoor situations, sort of hung up above them. And it turns these survival products into this really beautiful space, and the black beans like comfort your body like a weighted blanket. So there it's sort of like using the opportunity to make an art piece to try to make specific people sleep really comfortable and inviting. And I think that's also an interesting way to respond to the sort of commercialization of sleep.
Cressida: 25:50
You went to Black Power Naps, I think. And in your writing, you talk about the contrast between their sponsorship by a duvet company and the art installation itself.
Danielle: 26:00
Yeah, I mean, like you said, art doesn't exist outside of capital. And in fact, many of the people I write about like are doing a lot of their work on commission or they get a sort of one-off sponsor, and so they run with that. And when Black Power Naps was performed in New York City originally, it got the sponsorship from Buffy, which is a duvet company that makes a cloud comforter. And I thought they did a really clever thing with it. They sort of divided the space in two. Buffy was out in the lobby, and the Black Power Naps beds were in sort of the formal gallery space. And so they were both there, but right away you could see the contrast between them because Buffy makes one kind of comforter and it's supposed to be good for everybody. And it's supposed to be good for you because it's like a recycled product. So you can sort of feel good in an abstract way about your comforter being made of recycled plastic bottles or whatever. And it comes back to that feeling of like you can just fix your own sleep, like just get a better comforter and you'll sleep better. Yeah. Versus if you make your way into the actual exhibition, into the gallery, you get confronted with all these different, really lovingly crafted beds and all these different rainbow colors, and you start to see sleep as a kind of distinct and social experience where different people need different things and where there are histories of extraction or exploitation that mean we might need different things.
Cressida: 27:23
Yeah, and and Black Power Naps, I guess, is explicitly referencing that history of chattel slavery in the United States, that African Americans are a group of people who have been exhausted.
Danielle: 27:36
And that it was dangerous during the time of slavery, but also after for a black person to be seen napping in public space. Like at best they might be seen as lazy, and at worst it might be really risking law enforcement involvement.
Cressida: 27:50
Yeah. And so another thing you say about that example is you contrast the logics of capital and the logic of care. So can you just draw that distinction?
Danielle: 28:06
So I think the logic of capital is about getting everything you can out of your resources. So if sleep is a kind of resource, you're trying to like extract as much as possible for production out of it. And you can leave the husk behind in the same way we leave like natural resources behind. But you just need your workers to like work for you the best they can, and then it's over. And I think that's why actually a lot of workplaces have really invested in sleep as part of their sort of work-life balance programming in the past decade. I get a lot of university emails about going to workshops on like good sleep hygiene, sleep health, do a sleep meditation. And the logic of care is, I think, a logic of interdependence that like people don't get anywhere autonomously. There's no such thing really as like an individual worker who survives on their own. We're always dependent on other people. And sleep is what should and can make that visible to us because, you know, even if nobody lives with you in your apartment, you probably like wanted to live in a safe neighborhood where maybe the space around you is cared for, or you have a dormant. There are other structures sort of protecting you. And I think the logic of care is about trying to make that interdependence visible to people.
Cressida: 29:39
So there's a place where the logic of capital and the logic of care can they can be hard to separate sometimes. I'm thinking of certain kinds of white-collar workplaces, like really the one we're in included, that went through a phase, and maybe they're still in that phase of trying to get us into sleep education seminars or doing lunchtime yoga for a kind of speed refresh. So many big employers who operate these desk-oriented workplaces have these kind of wellness programs. And increasingly they include sleep as part of the things that you need to know about in order to be a more productive and efficient employee. And so it's tempting for the cynic in me to note that these education efforts do tend to ramp up when labor conditions deteriorate. Just for example, 1200 people fired from your institution.
Joshua: 30:35
Also they'd be like, make sure you're taking care of yourself so that you can do the work of three people. Exactly.
Cressida: 30:40
You're doing the work of three people. We won't say that.
Joshua: 30:42
Yeah.
Cressida: 30:43
Make sure that you're eating well and getting exercise. Take a short walk at lunchtime every day.
Joshua: 30:48
Because it's gonna get real.
Cressida: 30:50
Otherwise, you might go and jump off a cliff.
Joshua: 30:52
Yeah.
Cressida: 30:53
Yeah. So it's associated with workplaces that contain high-value desk labourers, usually. So people..."high value" in scare quotes, right? But people who are doing cognitively complex work that quickly diminishes in quality and quantity when they're not well. Workers in other sectors, of course, have their sleep regulated as well. Like if you're a pilot or a long-haul trucker, then we're talking about health and safety. And then there are other sectors, I think, where employers don't care at all about workers who are exhausted, right? We can just drop that one and move on to the next one. But in all of those different labor market sectors, regulating sleep is about maximizing what an employer gets out of a worker. It's about this kind of extractivist logic. Whereas the logic of care is about thinking about how we as workers can fight together to improve working conditions, whatever that might look like in your sector. So, of course, unionization is a theme here. But we're also talking about collective action for strategies like a four-day week, which sounds radical to some people, but there's lots of research on four-day week that shows that it's better and popular with the employers who've tried it. Um, so you're paid for five days, but you work for four.
Joshua: 32:10
Yeah, that's important.
Cressida: 32:12
That's important. Yeah. Or universal basic income, which is a strategy that also gets tried in certain pockets of the world every now and then.
Joshua: 32:21
To good results.
Cressida: 32:23
Yes, also good results. But those strategies would create a shared world with a kind of higher baseline for rest. And we might still do yoga at lunchtime, I suppose, or we might still take a nap on the job. It's not to eliminate those wellness strategies, but it wouldn't be in the service of just extracting more productivity from each individual. So we could imagine things where our goal is to collectively improve the conditions of work and rest.
Joshua: 32:52
And we talked a little bit about this with Sarah Sharma as well. She had these examples that I really liked about wasting time at work and where it's kind of built in either implicitly, maybe even explicitly, to a working environment that, you know, you finish a task and you're gonna go on your phone for a few minutes, or you have these pockets where you're going to be wasting time. And the examples that she used were of people who would just stand up and go like up and down the escalator, or who would just stand there, who would just stand up at their desk performing their time wasting. Yeah.
Cressida: 33:36
And in a way, it's Bartleby, but a performance.
Joshua: 33:39
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a performance of Bartleby.
Cressida: 33:43
Yeah. And in the conversation with Sarah, she also made this excellent point that many of the things that we're expected to do at work are themselves a waste of time. Employer-mandated waste of time. Like you will have to fill in this form in this particular way, and you will have to submit it to these, you know, three different people, one of whom will never reply to you, and then you will have to follow up. And all of that kind of mundane stuff that people in most every job have to deal with on some level. But time wasting as performance art, it strikes you when someone who calls themselves an artist is doing it in front of you and making you uncomfortable. But it strikes you differently when it's just something that you do tippy tapping at your keyboard every day.
Joshua: 34:32
Yeah. It's it's hard to talk about this without also quickly referencing Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." And that there are moments in every job that are wasting waste of time. But there are many, many people who feel like their entire jobs are wasting time. That's right.
Cressida: 34:55
Yeah, and that book is interesting because it does sort of kind of try to explain how we've got ourselves into an economy where significant sectors of employment consist entirely, not just of little bits and pieces of bullshit, but as you say, of bullshit jobs.
Joshua: 35:13
Yeah, that are just bullshit.
Cressida: 35:15
Just bullshit.
Joshua: 35:16
Yeah.
Cressida: 35:17
Yeah. So Danielle talked about another example of performance art that shows how the flow of capital can be interrupted by sleep.
Cressida: 35:33
There was a there's another big example, at least in the work that you sent me, which is "Best Place to Sleep."
Danielle: 35:40
Yeah. So this is a series of short performances by a Japanese artist named Sakiko Yamaoka. And, she calls them "Best Place to Sleep" and "Come with Me." And you can find some of them on YouTube. And basically, she leads people in napping in unconventional places in cities. And I particularly like when she does it in the lobbies of banks, like those ATM lobbies that you can sort of swipe into. And so in these videos, she'll show up with a sort of crowd of, you know, whatever, eight people. They're all kind of nondescript looking, and they go into a bank and they just all lie down on the floor right in front of the ATMs. And it means that everybody else who tries to use the bank has to like dodge around these sleeping people to get to the ATMs. And when she does it in Canada, they're actually especially polite about it, which I thought... was stereotypically nice.
Cressida: 36:30
That's awesome. That's awesome.
Danielle: 36:33
They're like, is it okay? Can I? Is it okay? So she puts these people right in the flow of capital. Like, you can't go about your day and get your money quickly without sort of acknowledging sleep. And without, I think, remembering that the other way those sort of vestibule spaces often get used is like for unhoused people to get some shelter if they're able to sort of get into the space after hours. So I like that because it's like, I don't know, it's taking something that's very serious, like about our access to a good place to sleep, and also making it kind of like funny and disruptive and present in the lives of just whoever is running around the city that day.
Cressida: 37:11
Yeah, as I try to imagine it, I think it must be a curious mixture of entirely inoffensive and a bit threatening. Like I'm not sure that I would know which of those reactions to go with. In the same way that the perhaps, I mean, this is a bit different because people come in and then lie down, but passing sleeping people on the street or in a park or whatever is, on the one hand, people at their most inoffensive. You know, it's people who are just doing absolutely nothing. They're not even there in a way. Um, but it's also, I think, perceived by many people as threatening to have people sleeping in public. And I think a lot about why that is and why the reaction so often is these people must be moved along. You know, this must not be allowed to persist, this sleeping in public. Have you thought about that?
Danielle: 38:02
I mean, it's the version of homelessness that, at least in the US, we're like most comfortable arresting people for. Like you can sort of be in public space and not doing anything until the second you fall asleep, and then some a police officer will come sort of jostle you awake. So I don't know if it's about, well, I know what some of the history is, which is that there's like a long history of trying to keep specifically like disabled people sort of out of public space, and disabled people and homeless people sort of get clumped together in this history. So I think there's a bigger sense of like if you're not a productive contributor to society, you should move along. And when someone falls asleep, that's our best signal that like it's daylight and they're not adding anything. So in some ways, I think it's just this really old legacy. But I think also when you sleep, you're vulnerable and law enforcement might feel more comfortable approaching you, knowing that they have a little bit of an upper hand on the interaction. And I think this is why it's so great. Yamaoka, I think, does some of these performances individually, but I really love the ones that she does with a group where it's just like a bunch of really average-looking people lying down with their head on their purse or whatever. And it tells you that it's not exactly the situation you're used to seeing every day. Like somehow a group of people have gotten together to do this, and it sort of signals that there's something going on and it might be worth like giving it a second look.
Cressida: 39:29
Yes, don't immediately freak out. Yeah. Yeah, be curious. It's so interesting because there's so much sleeping outside private residences that is not only tolerated, but even supported. So you'd referenced all of this push to workplace productivity and a parallel to the endless lunchtime seminars about good sleep hygiene is workplace napping. So the idea that we should set up some cots somewhere in your workplace so that you can have a little sleep alongside perhaps two or three of your colleagues, you know, horrible thought. And that will improve your productivity. Or planes, you know, where they really want you to sleep in rows. It's in a way you're very exposed when you're sleeping on a plane, but it's actively encouraged. And depending how much money you've got, you can pay for a better infrastructure to facilitate it. On other kinds of transit, I think it's also tolerated in a in a certain context, although I'm told that the Edmonton police like to eventually get to people who are just sitting on the bus, you know, as the bus does its circular route, that if you try to just stay on it and sleep, eventually they'll get you. But it's interesting why there are some sort of public, semi-public spaces where sleeping is encouraged and supported, and others where nobody should be doing it, in theory at least.
Danielle: 41:04
Yeah, it's so incredibly context dependent, whether sleep is threatening or sleep is the most natural sort of inoffensive thing.
Cressida: 41:12
Yeah, and has everything to do with uh class and the sense of your, like you'd said earlier, your the sense of your productivity or your value to society. Like, do we need to help this person sleep so that later they can work? Or are they just an obstruction or a nuisance if they sleep because we have no expectation that they will wake up and work?
Danielle: 41:36
Yeah, and it's where like the term "power nap" comes from, right? There's a certain kind of person who can nap in the workplace, nap in the middle of the day because it's for power, like so they know I can be a better worker. And actually, the person... "power nap" is a term that comes into use from this book on workplace productivity. And the person who wrote it just passed away. I'll have to look him up, but there were just these great obituaries about the founder of the power nap.
Cressida: 41:60
Yeah, and that's one of the things I think is clever about Black Power Naps is it's this portmanteau of black power and power naps. And who knows where the pause is, you know, black power... naps, or black... power naps. So yeah.
Danielle: 42:17
Yeah, you sort of feel power being tugged in both directions. Both directions. Is it about the sort of individual worker? Is it about the kind of racial collective?
Cressida: 42:25
Yeah, that's a great way of saying it.
Joshua: 42:37
So in another episode of the podcast, we'll be talking about sleep and money. Contemporary finance, of course, is completely global. So it's interesting to think about how financial assets are able to move around the world, especially in comparison to how people move around the world, or how the flow of capital has effects on the working and resting conditions of people who might have no idea about who owns or profits from that capital. Sort of capital flows easily, but the people are glued down and how those two forces interact. So here's a quote from Danielle's book. "The conditions of globalization, of course, affect sleep. This is a prominent theme in Galindo's performance art piece, "America's Family Prison," which stages the sleeping conditions of a migrant family incarcerated at the US-Mexico border. And in Yamaoka's participatory performance, "Best Place to Sleep," which uses public napping to interrupt bank patrons' access to the global flow of capital in ATM lobbies. Right alongside one another, these two performances measure the skewed velocities of global capitalism. Migrant families spend night after night stuck in place while money streams easily across borders."
Cressida: 43:52
Yeah, and Danielle goes on to make the point by talking about an old play by a British playwright called Caryl Churchill, called "Fen," is from 1983, which is set entirely in rural Britain and is about women who are farm workers, mostly who dig potatoes. And they're on land that their ancestors cultivated, so they have been there a very long time. They and their ancestors have been there a very long time, but the conditions of their labour are altered by international investment, a real estate deal that's executed by a multinational corporation that they don't necessarily know anything about, and they get exhausted in various ways. So there's this sense in both of these pieces that the way that people feel, feeling exhausted, depressed, burned out, hopeless, comes out of the way that global finance flows, that financial decisions about who will own which corporation, which piece of land, how things pass between companies at the international level, eventually filters down to these bodily experiences for people working the land or people who are trying to migrate between different countries under conditions of enormous duress. And so I think that that's an important thing to realize about sleep. Some of this global financialization affects how each of us feels, but we the chances that we'll ever really be able to trace that back are small.
Cressida: 45:26
I was really struck by that quote, because we have an episode about sleep and money, and it's proving to be one of the most difficult to produce. But what I like about the quote is the way that you're talking partly about speed, you know, like the phrase "migrant families spend night after night stuck in place while money streams easily across borders." That this is about who can move where and how fast or how seamlessly. But it's also about how feelings in one's body, very personal kinds of experiences, can be the result of, in this case, globalized capital. So can you say something more about how these dynamics are making more and more people tired and burned out in ways that they might never attribute to these bigger pictures?
Danielle: 46:30
Yes! As I was putting together this archive of sleep performance, one of the other things I noticed that many of them shared were these situations where characters would be really tired and frustrated and not at all able to explain why. Like every piece I'm talking about happens after the sort of major feminist late 60s, early 70s moment. And often the characters in them or the artists themselves can like articulate the feminist promises they were given. And then it's just not working out for them. Even these like farm worker characters in Fen who aren't presented as especially educated know they're supposed to be able to get a better job and a better partner and move to a city and get these like support systems, and they just cannot make it work. And I think that's where it's like there is a much, much bigger story about globalization, about our uneven investments in different people's speed, in different people's sleep. But they're often so hard to see from your own, our own perspectives. And so I think one of the things that interests me about these performances is the way they like dramatize them so that we can actually see them and see that some of some of this tiredness is working too much, but some of it is like a deeper, more existential thing where it's like you know you're supposed to be able to get this kind of life, and you can't figure out why you can't get to it.
Joshua: 48:10
One of the lessons of this project is turning out to be that feeling tired is a political feeling, or it can be.
Cressida: 48:17
Yeah. There's lots of debate about this in a certain corner of academic or intellectual life. So I'm reminded of Anne Cvetkovitch's book, "Depression: A Public Feeling," which is quite old now. But in that book, she talks both about her longtime experience of being depressed, what it's like to be Anne who is depressed. But she also tries to talk about the way that depression is represented and brought into existence by international pharmaceutical companies and psychiatric discourse and all sorts of things that are beyond the individual. And one of the lessons I took it, she was trying to convey is that both are real, right? That it's not that depression or burnout or fatigue aren't real experiences that we all have that are in our bodies and minds, but that they have origins that are outside of us that we might might not ever understand, but we might, the book is sort of trying to understand it. So, what what here maybe we're trying to do is to trace some of the ways that we feel burned out or exhausted or sleep deprived through those sorts of bigger stories.
Joshua: 49:28
Oh, yeah, I really, I really like that comparison. I think that makes sense. And how that tiredness can be a political feeling, as well as how resting or doing less could be a kind of resistance. It's not to like overcommit to one or the other.
Cressida: 49:44
Yeah. I mean, it could be, or it could just be that some annoying academics are telling you that your exhaustion has a political origin, sucks to be you.
Joshua: 49:54
Yeah.
Cressida: 49:55
We're trying, we're trying!
Cressida: 50:06
I'm noticing that these themes of exhaustion and burnout are everywhere right now in feminist, activist, and academic worlds. So those three intersect, but we could also think of them as three separate worlds. And it just seems like very many different groups of people, including some whom one might have thought of as quite privileged, are experiencing time theft or loss of control over working conditions, feelings of powerlessness, or just cynicism about what's possible. So why do you think that is? And is there a way, I guess this is the interesting question, is there a way of embracing rest, including sleep, that is sensitive to those differences?
Danielle: 50:49
Yes. I mean, I think there has to be. I think that the the this is one of the lessons of going back and trying to find sleep in sort of feminist theory along with feminist performance over the past 50 years, which is that there are always these cycles of people burning out and getting exhausted. I think this is often, you know, people know this Audre Lorde quote about self-care as a sort of radical or militant act. But what's happened right before she says that quote is that she's talking about how incredibly sick she is, and how she's so tired from working a poorly paid teaching job, from dealing with cancer, from trying to be an activist, that she sort of had to like try to take kind of a sabbatical, try to travel and just like get her life back together. So it doesn't come out of a place of sort of wanting more bubble baths, but out of saying, like, I can't keep doing this anymore unless there's space for rest built into it. And I think this is an area where sort of disability activists, disability performers have kind of been out in front of the rest of us because they are often thinking about how do you make something accessible to people who might need to be lying down, to people who might need a lot of sleep, to people who can't go march in the streets because it's physically impossible or it's too dangerous if they get arrested. And so I think the sort of disability justice movement illustrates that you can have kinds of political action that give people space to rest and time to recover. And then my other answer to this, as like a performance scholar, has to be that sort of artistic encounters are part of how we do this. I think doing this project ultimately brought me back to some of the sort of foundational, like humanist aesthetic training I have, which is in close reading and slow looking, these really stretched-out encounters with aesthetic objects where you just try to give them attention over a long period of time and see what you notice. That lets us get together and look at sleep and critique things about things that keep us from sleeping in our lives. But I think it also offers an important other thing, which is that it lets us imagine other ways of living and even like experiment with staging them, putting them up on their feet in a performance space. I think to sort of move past burnout or move past the cynicism about what's possible, you have to have a space where you can imagine something else where it's not just sort of trying to fix the problems, but thinking about like we could be living actually really differently, and there's something good that we're working toward.
Cressida: 53:33
What's your favorite piece of feminist art that includes sleep? Any more of the millions of examples I know you have in your archive that you want to get into the conversation?
Danielle: 53:44
Yeah, there's a solo performance from 1997 called "Menopausal Gentleman." It's by a queer artist called Peggy Shaw. I just I love it. I think it's hilarious. It's about Peggy Shaw performs it as herself, and she has hit menopause and she can't sleep, and she's like terrorized by not being able to sleep. And she gives this incredible performance of like mopping her brow throughout the show because she's always sweaty, and then she can never sort of get past that and get a good night's sleep. And there's a great moment in it that I think I always think of it when I'm getting a little bit too like soft and romantic about sleep, and those moments where I'm like, we should all just care for each other more, and then we'd all be happier. She tells a story about trying to sleep in a city apartment, and there's a nest of pigeon eggs outside her window, and this pigeon mother who keeps cooing as she sort of broods over her eggs. And one night she says she got up and she took chopsticks and she pushed each egg out of the nest and onto the pavement below, and all of the eggs shattered.
Cressida: 54:51
Oh, wow.
Danielle: 54:52
And she says, Well, like, I know what the pigeon was going through because I know what it's like to lose my eggs too.
Cressida: 54:57
Yeah, wow, wow.
Danielle: 54:59
I don't know. I think of it all the time as like what is actually kind of frustrating about sleep. We're dependent on all these other people. All these other people can mess it up for us.
Cressida: 55:08
Yeah, yeah.
Danielle: 55:09
Yeah, and and there can be a lot of anger and humor in it as well.
Cressida: 55:13
Yes. Also just the title Menopausal Gentleman is worth the price of admission.
Danielle: 55:19
Absolutely!
Cressida: 55:20
How do you sleep? Do you have a sleep story?
Danielle: 55:23
People ask me this all the time. I sleep really well. I don't know. I don't have a problem with sleep, and I feel like it's miraculous that I made it through writing the book without developing one. Yeah. I learned that there are certain texts about insomnia, especially, that are like almost contagious, and I had to sort of like be careful spending time thinking about them. There's a memoir by Samantha Harvey that like gives you insomnia. She's so good at writing about it that it's very distressing to read.
Cressida: 55:52
It didn't give me insomnia. But I was maybe already sort of too far into whatever I was into by the time I read it. "A Shapeless Unease."
Danielle: 56:02
Yeah, yeah. But I do, I do think that researchers basically all write about ourselves in some way. And I started this project when I was starting grad school, and I think some of the like exhaustion of academia was hitting me, and it made me interested in sleep.
Cressida: 56:17
Well, it's great to have somebody on the podcast who just says, I sleep great, no problems. And I'm a sleep researcher, you know.
Danielle: 56:25
The thing that I haven't been able to do is fall asleep during a performance. Like I'm very interested in people who fall asleep at the theater, but I have tried and cannot make myself do it.
Cressida: 56:35
Oh, well, that is a gift that menopause will give you, Danielle. So just hold on!
Friends clip: 56:45
Joey: Hey, you guys, what are you doing tomorrow night?
Friends clip: 56:48
Chandler: Well, let me see. I believe that I'm yes, falling asleep in front of the TV.
Friends clip: 56:53
Joey: My agent hooked me up with six tickets to a great play.
Friends clip: 56:56
Chandler: I could fall asleep at a play!
Cressida: 57:04
So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening and join us next time. Remember, episodes drop every two weeks on a Tuesday. So that's December the 16th for the next one. You can find "Sleep is the New Sex" on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website sleepisthenewsex.ca, that's C A for Canada, which also includes show notes that will connect you to everything referenced in the episode. Stay tuned at the end of the next episode as we'll tell you about our plans for the holiday break.
Cressida: 57:37
This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Niitsitapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudonosonee, and Anishinaabe, lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognise the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations.
Cressida: 58:17
Tom made me a coffee. Well, you weren't there, or he would have offered it to you.
Joshua: 58:20
You know where I was?
Cressida: 58:23
Where?
Joshua: 58:24
I was trying desperately to get a coffee. Desperately.