SINGAPORE: It's generally not a good sign for a show when actors fall asleep midway through a performance.

But Australian artist Deborah Pollard doesn’t mind if they did catch some Zs for her piece. The current TheatreWorks artist-in-residence’s Shapes of Sleep will be staged on July 26.

For a full eight hours, five performers will be lying down on individual beds. They will recreate the act of sleeping by following a set of instructions from speakers embedded on the mattresses.

Naturally, it can get exhausting and she expects them to fall asleep at some point.

“Because it’s eight hours and you’re following a set of instructions, it can get trance-inducing,” said Pollard, 42.

“It’s like sleeping on a plane, that feeling when you doze in and out.”

Shapes of Sleep is one of the three events on new media art happening next week at TheatreWorks, which also include Pecha Kucha Night on July 24 and Spektr! on July 28.

The idea for the piece came in 2002. Pollard was collaborating with Javanese artist Regina Bimadona in shooting experimental videos, one of which was to document her sleeping in the afternoon.

She was intrigued by the movements they captured. “You’re kind of awkward when you’re conscious of the camera, but when you doze off, you’d get this other movement you didn’t think your body could do.”

She later came up with different sets of instructions based on the movements, which the performers would follow.

Pollard said she almost didn’t want to do the piece because “every visual artist has done a ‘sleep’ piece” — including Andy Warhol’s famous video of poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours.

But she hopes that her own piece comes off as “far more poetic than just voyeurism”.

And if you thought watching someone sleeping or at least pretending to would be the most boring thing on earth, Pollard said that the piece — which has been staged in Sydney and has toured in the United Kingdom — has made people cry.

“They thought it was beautiful and reflected what humanity is. For this certain amount of time, we bare our soul when we’re in unconscious la-la-land.”

Of course, Pollard doesn’t expect audiences to stay for the whole eight hours. “They can come and go for coffee and return to see how the performers are doing.”

For obvious reasons, coffee isn’t allowed for performers although they’ll have water beside them — and are perfectly free to go on toilet breaks when the need arises.

Said Pollard: “It shouldn’t be an endurance test. I’m not a masochist.”

Shapes of Sleep is at TheatreWorks/72-13, Mohamed Sultan Road, July 26, 1-9pm. Admission is free. Call 6737 7213 to reserve seats. For the two other new media art shows, visit www.theatreworks.org.sg for details. - TODAY/fa