Within Cells Interlinked by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms in Frascati

Within Cells Interlinked is a transmedia performance blending dreams, corporate surveillance, and gameplay to explore the intersection of imagination and reality.

What if dreams are more than just hyper-real 3D experiences? What if they are encoded messages—signals we can decode to shape our waking lives? And what if changing our dreams could transform real-world itself?

This question is at the heart of Within Cells Interlinked, developed in collaboration with the Premonitions Agency, a specu-fictional government funded entity whose task is to collect and analyze citizens’ dreams—and intervene in them to affect real-world events.

The performance follows two of the agency’s investigators as they analyze and interfere in the dreams of two dreamers: A man who finds himself marrying a complete stranger in front of his entire family while traveling backward in time and; A woman chosen by a toddler as their parent—only to discover the child changes gender and runs on battery. Merging physical, virtual, and imaginary spaces, the piece plays at the boundaries of fiction and reality, intertwining dream logic, quantum mechanics, and bureaucratic surveillance to examine how dreams co-construct our waking lives.

The performance is based on real nighttime dreams, donated by the artistic team and several other dreamers.

The performance playfully explores the questions of free will and agency, sentience and imagination amidst the next wave of digitalization and globalization. By integrating dream logic and gameplay strategies, cosmology, quantum physics and mysticism, we explore how alternative perceptions and imaginaries can emerge when these logics are projected onto everyday life.

TILT also hosts Dream Archive: Live Collection, a participatory dream collecting performance where the audience can contribute their dreams to this research.

Within Cells Interlinked is the first performance in the performative-cinematic multiverse titled LUNARIS, a fictional shared world - embedded in the ‘real’ world – which Andrea Božić and Julia Willms are developing the coming years in collaboration with the Premonitions Agency. LUNARIS hosts a constellation of interlinked works: performances, audio-visual installations and related smaller works across performance and visual art.

Tour:

29-30 May 2024, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Het Huis, Utrecht

4-5 June 2024, Frascati, Amsterdam

23 January 2025, Theater Ins Blau, Leiden

22-23 May 2025, Frascati, Amsterdam

Long Table Talk with Andrea Božić and Julia Willms: Speculative Storytelling, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Stadsschouwburg Utrecht