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This project began years ago. Not before the Shops at UpTown Waterloo was built, but  more like 2018. The initial idea came out of another creative process, with an artist no  longer working with us. My work with this artist was focused on the experience of altered  states of conscious to be found in the retail landscape; we homed in on maladaptive  dreaming because this was a strategy that this person used to make it through a tedious shift of work at her job in the mall. Soon, for the rest of us working on this project, maladaptive dreaming became a resonant metaphor for all kinds of experiences in the  mall. In a sense, we all became daydreamers in a maladaptive way.  

Then the pandemic hit; so, our maladaptive dreaming went on for a couple of years. In  this time, three different mall managers have been part of the dream; the ensemble of  dreamers has changed — we’ve cycled through two casts of actors, we lost a stage  manager to a gig in Newfoundland, and we’ve found a new scenographer and technician.  Yet despite these disruptions, we’ve managed to keep this dream in the mall alive. 

Briefly, maladaptive dreaming describes a condition where a person regularly experiences daydreams that are intense and highly distracting – so distracting, in fact,  that the person may stop engaging with whatever they are doing, or with the people  around them. These daydreams may be triggered by real-life events or stimuli, such as a  noise, smell, conversation topic, movie, something on social media, or even a global  pandemic. Maladaptive dreamers may dissociate from reality to absorb themselves  completely in their daydream and may unknowingly act out the behavior or speak  dialogue for the characters in their daydream. The content of the daydreams is often richly  detailed and fantastical. So, the Shops at UpTown Waterloo, a well-appointed but mostly  vacant mall, became the perfect place for our performative examination of maladaptive  dreaming. 

At the core of both maladaptive dreaming and retail is fantasy. Most retail in the 21st century, especially now that almost all of it is online, exists because people have the  capacity to fantasize. Psychoanalysts in the tradition of Jacques Lacan have been  examining this form of fantasy for years. Fantasy designates our ‘impossible’ relationship  to the person or thing 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. An  important insight of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but  something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the  coordinates of a person’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the person  assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that a person is constituted as desiring; in other  words, according to Lacanian scholar, Slavoj Žižek, “through fantasy we learn how to  desire.” I think, essentially, the same can be said for the creation of theatre and the act of  shopping.

Perhaps our attraction to shopping is the way it fuels desire, and whether or not this is a  good thing has a lot to do with how desire is staged and thus how it is learned. According  to Lacan, the root cause of desire is the objet petit a, the chimerical focus of fantasy, the  object or person that attracts our desire and at the same time (and this is its paradox) is  posed retroactively by this desire. If this fantasy attraction threatens to disrupt the rational  order of our life, the balance between the realm of fantasy and the realm of reality, then  psychoanalytic therapy advises that we live the fantasy to its fullest in order to realize that  the power the object or persona of our desire has over us is in fact a void. That is, it becomes a void once the ‘staging’ is disrupted, and from this different perspective, we  can see how the psychic energy of our investment works. 

In Mall of Maladaptive Dreaming, in addition to creatively responding to a retail space, we  are essentially ‘collaborating’ with mannequins. Originally called Gaba girls, after their  creator, Lester Gaba, these beings of our retail space have 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, an empty space on which  we project our fantasies. Here the Gaba girl is sort of a void filled out by fantasy. 

But then we wondered, what happens when the staging of the void of fantasy involves  real people. Joanna Cleary, the writer on this project, made a bold decision in conceiving  a retail experience where women and Gaba girls are essentially inter-changeable, and as  such work together in the staging of desire for the gaze of mostly men. In this  development, I think the staging of a kind of erotic desire within the intimacy of our retail  space becomes a strange spectacle. Lacan identifies this as a shift from desire to drive 

in our relationship to the coveted thing. The Gaba girls become the fantasy screen of  some unattainable value – let’s call it the ‘perfect’ female form – that sets our desire in  motion, while the intimate interactions between these Gaba girls and our performers  exemplifies more the embodiment of a problematic enjoyment; that is, the relationship  between a woman and a ‘thing’ of retail, around which a perverse drive circulates. This  transformation from the staging of desire to that of drive consists precisely in the fact that  desire is by definition caught in a certain dialectic: it can always turn into its opposite or  slide from one object to another. The drive, on the other hand, is inert, it resists being  enmeshed in a dialectical movement; it circulates around its object, fixed upon the point  around which it pulsates.  

This, to me, seemed like the best way to describe the experience of being in this mall. A  place that through the staging of the desire of retail, we have found a form of perverse  spectacle that brings about a psychotic drive of inert fixation. This is the kind of inert  fixation that is within a form of capitalist development that sits mostly empty, upon a creek  that we buried in order to build it.