THE MACHINE OF HORIZONTAL DREAMS Comes To Sadler's Wells East In October
Performances run Thursday 16 – Saturday 18 October.
By: Stephi Wild Aug. 20, 2025
Multidisciplinary artist and researcher Pepa Ubera will present the world premiere of Sadler's Wells co-commission The Machine of Horizontal Dreams at Sadler's Wells East on Thursday 16 – Saturday 18 October. Through choreography, sound, light, video, and immersive technology, this boundary-pushing performance installation invites audiences to reimagine Western ideas of progress not as linear growth or individual achievement, but as collective care, cyclical time, and embodied experience.
Drawing from ecofeminist and post-humanist thought - and inspired by visionary writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown, Ubera proposes a framework where growth emerges through relationships, reflection, and radical dreaming.
Created in collaboration with a dynamic network of artists, technologists, and intergenerational community groups across the UK, The Machine of Horizontal Dreams is a richly textured environment. Ubera has completed an MFA in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban, with a thesis synthesising the research behind the piece.
Ubera has presented work internationally in venues such as Hayward Gallery, Dance4, Barbican, South East Dance and Arts Admin (UK); Matucana 100 (Chile); kampnagel (Germany); and Critical Path and TasDance (Australia). Her performance Ellipsis Land with Josefina Camus was featured in Tate Modern's first live exhibition Ten Days Six Nights and presented at Sadler's Wells Theatre across two seasons. In 2016 Ubera presented The Palest Light as a Sadler's Wells Wild Card and she was a Sadler's Wells Summer University artist (2015–2018).
Pepa Ubera said, "This work is an invitation to drift into a horizontal dreamscape, where the environment is not a backdrop but a collaborator; where humans, nature and technology weave new ways of sensing and belonging. Here, time stretches and folds, and progress is felt as a pulse in the body rather than a line on a clock. The Machine questions how we think, imagine, and shape reality and gathers audiences at Sadler's Wells East into a shared constellation of relating and dreaming."
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