Larry Dembski

The Figments of Reverie Point was staged as a role playing performance event on the Bennington College campus. It concerns attachment to the past, found family & blood family, and how miscommunication can permeate even deeply caring relationships. Here, people took on characters in a community of imaginative, magic people, and we built a collaborative story together. In facilitating and creating this project, I employed a spectrum of strategies including theatrical direction, scenic design, textile arts, ethnographic interviewing, playwriting, and ultimately a collaborative roleplaying process.

The Figments of Reverie Point began as a project in February of 2020 with the conception of the fictional world of Reverie Point, a small town where children, adults, ghosts, and imaginary friends magically coexist. From there, I spent the next year collecting interviews from 12 individuals who shared with me their experiences with growing up, nostalgia, imagination, and grief. I created two characters after each interview, ending with 24 character scores to give players inspiration.

Simultaneous to this writing process, I was working on a textile art environment to stage the scenes in. In the winter of 2020-21 I created eight embroidered textile panels which became the walls of the performance environment. Then I drafted and constructed a structure to stage performance scenes within.

After that, in the spring of 2021, I accumulated a cast of eight players to take on the characters of folks and figments in Reverie Point. These players participated in the scored but largely improvised scenes within the constructed textile environment. The scenes were the culminating moments where players met story & aesthetics, with a scene taking place every few days over the course of two weeks. These were moments of ritual, intimacy, and play.

The following pictures are artifacts from the last year and a half of creation. Thank you.

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