Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep

Abstract

Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep is a transdisciplinary work by Tanya Marquardt that tells the story of how they discovered a “sleeping self” named X through a sound-activated recording app on their iPhone. The piece imagines what might happen if our “waking” and “sleeping” selves met, conversed, and maybe even healed. CTR has published the fourteen-day texting version of Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, which invites audiences, or “experiencers,” to have a text thread with Marquardt and “X.” Like any other SMS conversation, the play is a mix of back-and-forth dialogue with language, emojis, recorded sound, video, and links.