The Crossroads of Fantasy, Denial, and Retail Reality at the Mall: The Making of Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming
In early 2020, members of WOOMcollaborative sought inspiration for a performance project at a mall. This mall existed in the middle of a mid-sized city in southern Ontario, Canada, called Waterloo. Similar to most malls in mid-sized cities in Canada, this mall was—and still is—dying. This death cycle seemed intriguing as a creative resource; when the COVID pandemic hit, it seemed all encompassing. For two years, we labored to realize and animate aspects of this retail landscape that addressed the very real feel of precarity we all faced. This labor assumed a form of dramaturgy (the work and weave of actions) that materialized crossroads between the mall’s built environment and the natural landscape upon which it exists, between collaborators and their lived experience of retail, and ultimately between our performance practices (writing, acting, video and soundscape creation) and the practices of retail.
At the core of our practice is a concern for how at the crossroads of fantasy and denial a space of misery and exploitation may exist. Most retail in the 21st century, especially with almost all of it online, exists because people have the capacity to fantasize. Fantasy designates our ‘impossible’ relationship to the person, thing, or lifestyle that we most desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario wherein a person’s desire is realized, and this basic definition is adequate so long as we take it literally; that is, what fantasy stages is not a scene in which desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes—that stages—desire as such. It is only through fantasy that a person is constituted as desiring; in other words, through fantasy we learn how to desire, and Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming attempted to realize the crossroads of theatre and retail in this form of learning.
Just as retail is in decline, the ways of living we knew before the pandemic have become inaccessible. We are at a metaphorical crossroads between accepting reality as it is and coping in more maladaptive ways—such as through fantasy. Theatre, like retail, is one of these fantasy spaces where we can immerse ourselves in a world more seductive and pleasurable than the one where we live. In Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming, we strove to deconstruct the ways in which retail and theatre create fantasy spaces that pose questions about how we stage desire.
As well as creatively responding to a retail space in this piece, we were essentially ‘collaborating’ with mannequins. Originally called Gaba girls, after their creator Lester Gaba, these beings gradually assumed an increasing presence in our creative work. Indeed, in spending about two-years with these peculiar representations of women, we wondered what happens when a Gaba girl becomes a sort of object of desire in a retail context. Lacan’s definition of an object of desire—an objet petit a —states that as soon as a person, or, in this case, a thing, becomes elevated by our desire, it starts to function as a kind of screen or empty space on which we project our fantasies. In this performance, the Gaba girl was a sort of a void filled out by fantasy. Perhaps not unlike the use of ‘smart’ technological objects that are growing more prevalent, the Gaba girl promises much but delivers less than we want or need.
Credits: Video of the woman in the creek (Gisel Sarahi Vergara Herrera) and the virtual tour of The Shops by Gary Kirkam
Video recording of conference presenters by Andy Wright (IG @only1andywright)
Video editing of LMDA digital presentation by Brooke Barnes