Plexus Polaire: Dracula: Lucy’s Dream

Notes Toward a Phenomenology of Depiction:
A Review of Plexus Polaire’s Dracula: Lucy’s Dream

An Essay by Katherine McNamara

1. The Night Erotic

What lives in the night? What dream haunts us? As if entranced, we experience an imaginarium where passions vibrate and arouse us, which we envision and, upon waking, give shape. In January 2025, I attended Plexus Polaire’s performance of Dracula: Lucy’s Dream at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and was absorbed by the company’s spectacle as girlish curiosity was transmuted into horror. Amid video shadows, conjoined bodies of puppets and actors fling themselves into a dream space, an erotic dream that begins in innocence and ends in wolfish blood.

Ingrid Aspeli is the artistic director of Plexus Polaire; I’m interested in her phenomenology of depiction, particularly in how she gives form to the invisible, “the things we don’t know.” “[A] puppet, it’s kind of like a medium,” she has said.

It’s like… it is a dead object that comes alive, and I think that, within just that premise of something dead coming alive lies kind of the answer to all of the things we don’t know. So that somehow the puppet becomes like a medium, or something that connects to the other side, or to the unknown, or to the underworld (Why Not Theatre, 2022: 2:59-3:26).¹

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the great modern literary myth, was until just before publication to have been titled The Un-Dead. It is not the only literary treatment of that vampire and his predations. Aspeli likes intertextual play. She knows the 1900 Icelandic version called Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness), which its editor, Valdimar Ásmundsson, derived from the Swedish novel, itself possibly based on an early draft by Stoker. These northern versions are described as more erotic and more political than his, and Makt Myrkranna remains part of Iceland’s literary tradition.² Aspeli also is fascinated by Nordic mythology; Ásmundsson was involved in publication of the Icelandic sagas. (It is not irrelevant to say, too, that he was married to a feminist lawyer and publisher.)

Bram Stoker’s Lucy Westenra is an English rose, blond and innocent. She thrills at the thought of sex, disguised as marriage: If only she could marry all three of her suitors! Aspeli re-presents a Lucy with flowing red hair, who vanishes into mirrors, fractures into multiples. She wears a white robe: her night garment, her grave garment. Embodied as both living and not-alive, swiftly changing from actor to life-sized puppet and back, she is the center of this twice-told tale, while  the dark Count lurks at its edges as if glimpsed in her peripheral vision. Her “blood” forms the connection between them, the living and the undead, through desire. Then Aspeli reverses the order of death back into life. Stoker’s Van Helsing speculates learnedly about Lucy’s intercourse with the vampire: She is a sleepwalker; she is ravaged in her dream state; she has become monstrous; her undead body must be exorcised and decapitated. Inverting that fate, Aspeli’s Lucy wakens to fight off the Count, as he shape-shifts from dog to wolf to spider to seducer. She wavers. Then with the strength of three—three Lucys, armed with blades!—she overpowers him, it. Upending the myth, these fierce red-headed Lucys stab then behead the contorted creature, who floats off into the dark. We see a living Lucy gather herself before her reflection—her dreaming self—as it fades. She exits the night.

2. Of the Imaginary: A Dramaturgy of Transformation

Aspeli’s troupe employs various technologies to impersonate and to amplify passions. She says that, while she begins with the text, the company develops the performance in collaboration. The score, partly sung, induces both languor and menace. Video projects moving light as if against closed eyelids. Pulling long red strings as if they are playing at cat’s-cradle, her suitors metaphorically transfuse the dying Lucy. Her red hair evokes the Demon of Folklore, then feistiness. The set is simple: a revolving bed, on which the Lucy-actor becomes a life-sized Lucy-puppet and, thus distanced, endures choreographed grotesqueries. The illusion of mirrors becomes walls closing in. By sleight of hand, one thing turns—is turned―into another. Transformation is the motif. Here is the dog—good puppy! good puppet!—which Lucy, good girl, tries to pet. Blink, Dog morphs into Wolf; Wolf erupts as the undead Dracula. Transformation is swift as magic.

I took a workshop on chorus work with the actress/puppeteer Marina Simonova, a member of the troupe. She had trained in Russia and France and was as lithe as an acrobat. Deftly she led a group of twenty or so of us in a series of exercises: looking inward to inhabit the body, breathwork, circular movement, making eye contact. Then, with permission, touching; after that, manipulating a play-partner’s limbs as if they were a puppet’s. The exercises were precise, cumulative, until in groups of four we were allowed to handle half-sized figures Bunraku-style—three handlers behind, a director in front. I began to comprehend the muscular training—chorus work—required to animate the puppet collectively from behind. “Sometimes we can see [actors] manipulate the puppets, but the puppets don’t know it,” says Aspeli. “To play with the different facets of this relationship allows us to tell stories in parallel levels, so that it’s somehow like a vertical dramaturgy” (Why Not Theatre, 2022: 8:26-8:45).

I will not forget the eeriness—I shiver, remembering—of looking into the eyes of the puppet.

We know when it’s a puppet that it’s not real. We know that even if it’s really well manipulated, even if it’s like really well lit, we still know that it’s not true. And at the same time, there’s something, if we use it in the right way, when we then go with it and choose, to kind of invite the public to still believe in it, then it’s something even stronger that happens (Why Not Theatre, 2022: 9:20-9:46).

This is, for me, her starting and finishing place: “But I think that in putting puppets, using puppets onstage in this way, it allows us to visualize something that we can feel but not necessarily explain” (Why Not Theatre, 2022: 3:44-3:53).