Breathing Matter(s): Dreamover with Dion McGregor + Eröffnungsperformance von OJOBOCA

Dion McGregor's greatest success came with Barbra Streisand’s song Where is the Wonder. But he is better known to posterity as the most garrulous sleeptalker in recorded history.


Struggling to survive in 1960s New York City, he would “couch surf” at friends’ apartments, including the actor Carleton Carpenter and the "grandfather of gay porn,” filmmaker Peter De Rome (in whose film Mumbo Jumbo he starred). When he moved in with his friend and fellow songwriter Mike Barr, Barr was astonished to find out what they already knew, that he would dream — out loud, and at length — in the wee hours of the morning.


Over seven years, Barr would tiptoe into his living room where McGregor was still asleep on a tiny twin bed and record his somnolent stories. They were curious confabulations whose content was often outlandish and surreal, but whose structure was more coherent than dreams as we usually understand them. They were populated with existential quandaries, violent fights, invented languages and songs, riffs and puns, and black humor of the most unimaginable kind.


This night’s Dreamover with Dion McGregor is curated by Steve Venright and consists of a 12-hour selection of the extant, unpublished, and unheard recordings of Dion’s dreams from the 1960s. Marked both by tender empathy and vile misanthropy, they offer a cartography of our sleeping selves, when the brain is left to weave its yarns outside our daytime regime of consent and constraint.


People are invited to come and spend the night at silent green, moving between sleep and nocturnal revery, and descending into the dream-world of Dion’s, and your own unconscious.

Sat–Sun, August 2–3
silent green Kuppelhalle
Start: 21:00