Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These

Now it’s time to get out of that infernal head of yours. Just go with it for a minute. Get far out of your head, then let it all go.

Imagine taking a roller coaster ride after a couple doses of NyQuil. Keep your hands inside the car at all times and feel the swirl, let the breeze just twist all up and down until your stomach drops and your head spins.

You’re out of your head now, which is good. Sometimes you have to get out of your head if you want a really heady experience.

Welcome to Dreamland Theater in Ypsilanti. The signposts up ahead all point you toward that unfettered and whimsical part of your psyche. You know, the one you threw into storage when you decided to major in accounting rather than tour with your noise rock band.

Dreamland is here to bring it all back. It’s sticky sweet childhood memories chased with a strong shot of grownup psychoanalytical panache.

Oh, and there are puppets. You probably need to know about the puppets. There are lots of them. Big ones, smaller cloth ones, downright freaky ones, an exquisite winged one made from metal utensils. They hang on the walls as art, animate onstage in avant-garde performances, delight little kids on Sunday afternoons and sometimes hang like parasitic twins from the necks of human actors.

Dreamland Theater, in its Washington Street abode since 2006, has been making puppetry a cutting-edge art since founder Naia Venturi started it in 2002. She makes all those puppets herself, a craft she learned after a childhood of watching her artist mother make hand puppets for her.

“It’s been my dream to have a space like this,” says Venturi, an Ann Arbor native who still attends to a day job as a bio-engineer. “I thought it would be really cool to have people do art without it being part of the art industry.”

If one thing’s clear about the enigmatic Dreamland Theater, it’s not a part of any industry. Or linear structure. Or anything.

The theater offers a whiplash mélange of adult-oriented puppet shows, children’s puppet shows every Sunday afternoon, music, film screenings, band rehearsals, multimedia art exhibits and an all-around welcoming place for Ypsilanti’s right-brained denizens.

“It’s the only venue I know of where one night it’s a children’s puppet show, the next night do a noise puppet show, and the next night be doing adult-themed music shows, and the next night they may have a folk band,” says Carrie Morris, a puppeteer/director with Dreamland who recently returned after spending a year in Indonesia studying puppetry.

“It’s really accessible,” she says. “All of the different art forms that will show up here … it’s really remarkable.”

In short, Dreamland’s doing the kind of cool, standing-on-the-ledge-and-ready-to-jump-into-the-abyss type of stuff Ann Arbor used to do before it became, well, something known as A2 and a place too expensive to park, let alone live.

Venturi herself came to Ypsilanti after graduating with a physics degree from the University of Michigan. She grew up surrounded by the arts, courtesy of her mother, and big ideas, courtesy of her engineer/inventor father.

When it seemed like a good idea to start up her own art space and puppet theater, Venturi thought Ypsilanti made a good fit – initially for the cheaper cost of living and rent. But she now sees a very real and vibrant art scene starting to hop in the city, one that’s been either gentrified or otherwise mainstreamed in Ann Arbor.

“I like it so much better than Ann Arbor now,” says Venturi. “[Ann Arbor] changed a lot over my lifetime. There’s a lot more structure.”

That’s how it always is, she adds. It seems you get a really cool scene happening in one place.

Everyone wants to live there, so everyone starts moving there. Soon everyone causes the cost of living to go up until those same ragtag artsy types who made the city so desirable in the first place can’t afford to live there. So they head to a smaller, lower-cost city nearby, where the glare of expectation and pretension isn’t so bright. There they rebuild, and start making art again.

That, says Venturi, is where Yspilanti is now. As evidence she points to the collective of artists who drop in at the Dreamland to hang out, talk or play music on any given night of the week. There’s Chris Sandon, artist and member of Dirty Bros. Quality Productions, which presents art and music events and productions.

Morris, meanwhile, notes how noise music is not only big in Ypsilanti, the city is practically a mecca of the scene.

Then there’s Patrick Elkins, Morris’ husband, author/musician and founder of the Totally Awesome Fest, a grassroots music festival taking place at a bunch of venues around Ypsilanti in late April.

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Megan Pennefather is a freelance writer living in Royal Oak. This is her first article for Concentrate.