My practice is deeply interested in consent and risk, and it always involves relating to, respecting and troubling power dynamics. I am in a position of power, because I hold more the map. I created this world that is going to hold the audience participant and myself...
…I’m curious about what happens when we level the playing field as much as possible. When we’re literally on the same level, sitting on the floor together in the Cage.
King Lexie’s Dream Cage at first glance makes use of familiar immersive theatre tropes: a one-on-one experience with surreal sets, dealing in dreams as its subject matter.
Yet when we step into the Cage we discover something very different: a deeply responsive and emotionally resonant experience that holds our deepest dreams and desires in a space of safety.
King steps out of the Cage and into the Voidspace to tell us more about the roots, philosophy and practice behind the experience.
Voidspace:
Hi, King. Welcome to the Voidspace. I’m so excited to welcome a new person into the Void. Thank you for being here.
King Lexie:
You’re welcome. It’s my favourite place to be.
Voidspace:
Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m going to start by asking you to give us an overview of who you are and what you do.
King Lexie:
I am King Lexie, and it feels fitting to say that I create works from the Void. I’m an interdisciplinary performing artist and therapeutic coach, and my art and life practice currently centre on dreaming.
I work with the material of the moment, as most performers do. Even if I prepare a set, script, or workspace, I’m always beholden to what happens in the moment, which I also call the void. It’s an opening and a possibly space, not at all unlike ‘the Void’ as a concept and dare I say, experience.
I’m in service to what’s here, as an artist and as a human. I’m interested in staging experiences of consent and risk and creating a sense of fearlessness so people can get curious about the materiality of their experience.
Voidspace:
That’s such a lovely intro. When you say you work in an interdisciplinary way, what does that mean to you? It can mean so many different things.
King Lexie:
My training is truly interdisciplinary. I studied dance, music, voice, theatre, critical race, feminist queer theory, alongside contemplative and meditative practices like Ikebana (Japanese flower and sculptural arranging).
I also trained in an ensemble early on. We worked five days a week for years. I often say I have a degree in rolling around on the floor.
So interdisciplinary for me means a triple threat… and then infinity beyond that, because I studied first at a Buddhist university where contemplative and community practice were foundational.
My private practice is informed by these (inter)disciplines- as well as adjacent studies of professional coaching, focusing oriented therapy, Ketamine assisted therapy (Integration after psychedelic or spiritually emergent experiences). Together with my partner, we led art and meditation based residential retreats and workshops in the US and Brasil.
Voidspace:
That’s a beautifully wide range of disciplines. Sometimes people say “interdisciplinary” and mean, for example, “I work with performance and digital art,” (which is also wonderful!) but I love hearing it described in a way that includes both tools and intentionality.
King Lexie:
Yes. And inside one-to-one somatic inquiry, working closely with people, the way performance and live art function therapeutically becomes obvious.
There are spaces art can take you that therapy sometimes can’t. I’m interested in how art and performance already care for people.
Voidspace:
That’s interesting. I’ve noticed since the pandemic a big rise in interest in the intersection between performance and care.
Earlier immersive work, especially in the early 2000s, often focused on unsettling people, throwing them out of their comfort zone, creating dysregulation because it felt exciting.
There’s room for that danger, but it requires self‑awareness and tools to handle how people respond. That’s something that has really developed over time.
You said the artistic space can do things therapy can’t. I’m curious what you mean.
King Lexie:
My practice is deeply interested in consent and risk, and it always involves relating to, respecting and troubling power dynamics. I am in a position of power, because I hold more the map. I created this world that is going to hold the audience participant and myself.
But because the material of the piece is created ‘ta na hora‘ made to order in Portuguese – and is a shared day or night dream offered by the audience participant, neither of us can know how the performance will go. There is something fresh that emerges for both, each and because of the interaction.
I’m curious about what happens when we level the playing field as much as possible. When we’re literally on the same level, sitting on the floor together in the Cage.
One inspiration for this work is Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit, and his work, Focusing, and Thinking at the Edge.
The Cage says, “I know I’m holding the map, but I want to share it with you as much as possible”.
Voidspace:
I’ve been talking to a lot of people about where the locus of power sits in immersive and interactive performance.
In traditional theatre, the performer is literally elevated: lit, staged, supported. Placed on a different level from the audience.
When you strip that away and share space, the power dynamic is still there. It’s not about glamour or charisma; it’s the power of being the one who knows the structure, even if it’s flexible. As you say, being the one holding the map.
It’s fascinating to think about how you disrupt or level that relationship.
Before we go deeper, for people who haven’t experienced the Dream Cage, could you give a brief overview of what people encounter when they step into it?
King Lexie:
Maybe it would be fun to hear you talk about it. When we were in the Cage together, the interaction felt so Void‑tastic. There was such a charge to it.
Voidspace:
It was incredible. Even talking about it now, I can feel it in my body again. I love how something that lives in the imaginal can be brought into the body. That’s part of what makes it so powerful.
It lets the participant play: step outside themselves as much as they need or want to.
Let me describe my experience of the Dream Cage:
There’s a small onboarding area where you’re invited to an “appointment,” but there are scenographic cues suggesting you might be in a dream. It gently moves you out of reality and into a different reality, a smooth transition that works beautifully.
Then you enter the room. The set design, light, and sound make it both contained – therapeutically contained – and comfortable. Cushions on the floor. It’s almost my vision of the Voidspace, which is a warm, slightly dusty attic with beanbags and floor cushions, big enough to welcome everyone.
Back to the Cage itself: the space is also made strange. My favourite prop was the record player: green lit, the record spins, the needle isn’t touching it, but sound comes out. It’s beautifully Lynchian: familiar but strange enough to shift you into a subconscious space.
Everything is set up to stage the core interaction. You asked me about a dream, and something surfaced: probably the closest I’ve had to a mystical experience. I think the whole atmosphere and environment that you’d set up, and then finally the music, that triggered it.
I can’t ever completely turn off my analytical brain. I noticed certain techniques, like mirroring, which I recognised, but still felt deeply. But even with that critical eye, I was fully inhabiting the experience because the combination of theatrical framing, deeply connective yet gentle embodied experience, and the Cage itself is so extraordinary. Constructing that cage must have been a ride. It’s real but not real, straddling that space between dream and waking realities perfectly.
And then there was your performance: the design and framing are essential, but the way you led or followed the conversation is what made the experience. Without that, the set wouldn’t create the same impact. Together, they drop you into a different psychological reality.
There are two elements I’d love to hear more about: the design, and the performance itself.
King Lexie:
Thank you. It’s nice to hear it back. That’s part of the dramaturgy: saying something and hearing it reflected.
Mirroring is a device, but it’s also authentic. We’re together in it; I’m feeling and listening along with you.
There’s something democratic about knowing we’re in something together from the start.
Being inside a golden eight‑and‑a‑half‑foot cage with no doors, yet still contained, is key. It signals something to the psyche. It plays with the subconscious, the dream world, symbols.
“I know why the caged bird sings.” Are we contained? Could we be held captive? But also the Cage is open: you can leave at any moment.
Voidspace:
Yes. We’re choosing our own connection in captivity.
Often immersive work tries to hide the fact that we’re choosing to play together, but for me, the best work acknowledges it. The shared democracy of play is important.
King Lexie:
It reminds me of Los Angeles. It’s a place where you can play at being real, and really play at being phoney or artificial.
You can see someone who has made themselves into a 1960s Barbie – the hair, the body, the pink Corvette – and it pokes at what reality is and what it can be.
I’m always interested in how the dream world or imaginal world is the real world, and the real world is also the imaginal.
For me, the void – or the black hole at the centre of our chest – is a place we can fall into and find safety that is not of this world, yet completely of this world.
It’s made of nervous systems, of connecting points we don’t have to manufacture.
Mycelial networks under the ground, dolphins communicating, whales speaking across oceans, sharks with magnetic receptors that guide them through the deep. The wonders of what’s here are already extraordinary.
We don’t need to manufacture anything. The question is: how can we set something up so we can rest and relax into each other and find a safety that isn’t based on defence or protection?
A safety that says your deep feelings and desires don’t need to be hidden or relegated to therapy or kept private.
Theatre – proper theatre – has always been interested in making the private public.
How do we see the material of dreams not as something exposing our “messed‑up parts,” but as expressions of our humanity and naturalness?
How can we play with the parts of us that desire submission or power, without repressing them? Repression creates harm: we see that everywhere in the world.
Voidspace:
It feels important, real, and exciting that we can engage with these things on purpose rather than letting them leak out in harmful ways.
King Lexie:
Exactly. Otherwise they pop up in destructive ways.
Voidspace:
I’ve been thinking about the relationship between interactive theatre and the “weird” experience: the esoteric, the magical, the occult. I’m interested in how artistic experience and the weird experience overlap.
A lot of my writing explores the elision between the myths our ancestors told to make sense of the world and the embodied psychological experiences we experience today.
It’s not just storytelling. There’s a real basis for it, because our brains are the tools through which we perceive reality. In a way, if it’s a story that we tell, it’s also true. We’re just touching one part of the elephant at a time.
I heard something on the Weird Studies podcast that really resonates with me: the Weird is not about distancing yourself from reality, but about opening yourself to possibility through trust.
This feels like it connects to what you said about allowing people to experience their own darkness, or strangeness, without shame.
Many people drawn to this work, myself included, are exploring their relationship with shame and strangeness.
The tension between shame and release is huge, which is why so much of this ends up in horror writing: exploring the darker, more activated parts of ourselves.
What I found fascinating about Dream Cage is that it goes to those same places, but without horror. It’s the opposite: radical acceptance.
I was swept up in something beautiful and transcendental, but part of me wonders what would have happened if I’d brought something more hidden or troubling into the space. It feels like the piece is designed to hold that too.
King Lexie:
That’s beautiful. There’s no preference. Whatever you bring is welcome.
Your curiosity now becomes the next invitation: “What happens if I bring this next time?”
Voidspace:
That feels like a more difficult proposition from here, but that’s because I’m here and not in the Cage.
King Lexie:
Exactly. You can save it for when you’re in the space again.
There’s intimacy and trust in the experience. It challenges how we traditionally understand safety and how we decide who is “like‑kind” or trustworthy.
Feeling something that is a bit scary is welcome too.
Voidspace:
Your role as facilitator is to hold that space of safety so that can happen.
King Lexie:
Yes. My training in somatic and therapeutic practice is inseparable from who I am, so holding that space is a joy for me.
There are other incredible one‑to‑one artists – like Adrian Howells – whose work was deeply intimate.
Voidspace:
I’m not sure it’s a question, but I found it interesting when you talked about exploring submission and power dynamics.
These dynamics appear in other work, but rarely with this level of openness and honesty.
I’ve seen companies play with these dynamics intensely – sometimes exploitatively – and then distance themselves from the consequences by saying, “It’s just art; if you don’t get that, that’s on you”.
It creates distrust between the company and the audience who are drawn to those dynamics.
It’s refreshing to hear you acknowledge these dynamics in an integrated, honest way.
Shame is part of it. People are uncomfortable talking about these dynamics because they feel they’re revealing something shameful about themselves.
It’s hard to create a space where people feel safe discussing power dynamics, even in an artistic context.
I’m curious whether that’s something you’ve encountered.
By which I mean people’s unwillingness to talk about these power dynamics because they fear being judged, or that acknowledging them reveals something about themselves.
King Lexie:
Thank you for bringing all of that. I can feel the tenderness in it, and the liveness of it too.
Talking about these dynamics is one thing, but experiencing them is another.
In Praise Cage, the first iteration of the work, the focus was on giving voice to desire and hearing that desire sung back to you.
In Dream Cage, you’re working with depth material: unconscious material, things on the underside, things that belong to what James Hillman would call the archetypes of the dark, the deep, the hidden.
These have their own region of imaginal space‑time where they emerge from and exist.
While I don’t fully subscribe to the idea that they exist in a single specific place – I’m too promiscuous for that – I love the idea of them appearing from unexpected dimensions.
Voidspace:
That’s so funny: being so afraid to acknowledge something exists that you parcel it up into an alternate universe.
King Lexie
I want to circle back to the ancestral, because you mentioned the occult and the ancestral earlier.
Dream Cage is deeply connected to my Greek ancestry and to the way dreams were treated in antiquity and earlier.
There was a belief that dreams came through the waters of the earth; literally through springs and underground channels.
People would go on pilgrimages to ask for a dream in a prophetic way, drinking the water of a particular place and then sleeping in a sacred space to receive a dream about a question or problem.
They would then speak about the dream with a priest figure. Asclepius – in many ways an early psychologist – believed the material of dreams reveals itself to you as yourself, in the live moment.
And then there’s the Oracle of Delphi, where priestesses inhaled vapours that put them into a trance or psychedelic state and they would deliver the oracle to the seeker, who then had to interpret it themselves.
There’s an authorship that isn’t of the separate self. Not the ego trying to “solve” the dark or dramatic parts of life so it can fix childhood wounds or forgive parents.
Instead, there’s a network of intelligence. Something underground, something in the water, that reveals itself through dreams and the imaginal.
What has been deemed shameful is often rich.
A major source for this work, especially Praise Cage, is Audre Lorde’s writing on the erotic. Eros as life force, as something repackaged by society into something we’re told to fix or process.
But what if instead we savour it, enjoy it, and build capacity in our nervous systems, together, to welcome more intensity?
If someone brings a dream into the cage, and suddenly their ancestor is there, without anyone planning it, that’s part of the work.
This happened often: someone would say, “I didn’t bring anything,” and then suddenly remember a dream of their grandmother sitting on the bed, or something equally vivid and unexpected.
There’s nothing off limits.
Voidspace:
The reason nothing is off limits is because you’ve structured the experience the right way around.
When the performer brings the material into the room, you need boundaries, consent, and clarity about what you’re introducing into a vulnerable space.
But you’re doing something different: you’re inviting the participant to bring their material into the room. If something is off limits, that’s for the participant to feel, not for you to impose.
Because you remain open and responsive, the safety is built into the mechanism itself.
King Lexie:
I’m glad you said that, because it’s also a rule of the game.
In task‑based performance, there are rules, finite and infinite games, and we’re saying: “These are the rules of this game.”
If we colour outside the lines, that’s exciting. We go somewhere we’ve never been before, and there’s electricity, a charge, a neurological spark.
One of the rules of the game here – especially with focusing, dream‑oriented focusing, and deep listening – is that everyone who comes in is told beforehand that they do not need to share any of their material.
Sarah Thorogood, one of the performers who has played the hypnagogic dream secretary, noted that this was repeated several times: you don’t have to tell me anything.
This is incredible; for the therapist, the coach, the performer – and for the participant – because, as you said, they are responsible for how much they want to share or not share, and it doesn’t diminish the process at all.
We don’t need to…
Voidspace
Exactly. For the purposes of the tape, King Lexie is doing a sort of… half‑octopus, half face‑sucker motion, like extracting someone’s juju through a vacuum.
That’s a really smart way of negotiating the danger inherent in that power imbalance, because when you’re in a vulnerable space with a performer who has the map, there can be pressure, as a participant, to respond in kind.
That pressure could take people into places they might regret afterwards.
But having explicit permission to keep back whatever you want to keep back helps you feel your agency is intact.
King Lexie:
Yes. And likewise, on the way out, there’s a convention of aftercare.
There’s an invitation to write something down. There’s a chair where you can sit, and you can sit with the dream secretary in the hypnopompic state – that liminal moment after the dream.
Because I’m doing this dream work myself. It’s not something I put on other people to figure out. It’s something I practise every day.
It’s not like Freud, who famously never submitted to psychotherapy himself, or who was still high on cocaine and didn’t acknowledge how that factored into his scholarship.
We’re just being honest about it instead of hiding it.
And there’s more that’s important and relevant to how women’s stories and femmes’ stories – the stories of the dark feminine, the underground, the chronic, the bubbling‑up – were actively repressed in the narrative.
Because the people abusing women were men, women would report traumatic experiences, and early research showed hysteria was connected to trauma: the body remembering, the body keeping the score.
But if Freud had acknowledged that openly, he would have implicated the very men funding the therapy and the research.
So already you have capitalism and patriarchy intertwined in the repression of these stories.
So for me, it becomes: I want to make a cage, and I want you to feel you can be bound by it if you want, or you can jump out the door and roll around it if you want.
There are no limits to what we can do there.
And I’m not going to impose anything. In other contexts, I might invite people to jump, dance, scream (and people did scream in the cage) but there are no limits.
We’re getting to know each other moment by moment. Consent is shifting ground.
What is it like to build a network of humans who know how to handle changing consent?
Someone says no, then says yes, then checks again: “Is that right?”
And then maybe: “Wait; no. Thank you. I’m stepping back.”
That responsiveness is a big fuck you to top‑down modes of therapy and art‑making.
It says: we’re alive, we’re lit, we’re living systems, we have agency, we know who we are.
All of that is part of building the Cage, and also thinking about Freud sitting forward while the patient lay down, creating a spatial hierarchy.
I’ve played with that a lot: what is it to sit down? What is it to change roles? What if the participant sits down and asks you?
Voidspace:
I love that – a genuine upending of a common power dynamic in these spaces.
King Lexie:
I went to the Freud Museum in North London. It’s fantastic. There’s the original psychoanalysis couch downstairs, and a replica upstairs that you can actually sit on.
I staged an impromptu site‑specific performance there: I lay on my stomach, spread out, this spread‑eagled character on the couch, playing with the space that dictated, “This is how you lie, and Freud sits here and tells you what it is.”
It was fun to enact that as part of the research: exploring what it feels like, and then shifting places.
Your work, and how that is a movement of it, matters. Because even in the ephemerality of performance, the ephemerality of appearances is already inbuilt. Life is like that.
A fundamental element of my master’s degree at Goldsmiths, in Performance-Making, was about re‑performance and writing: writing alongside pieces of work. Not as an exercise in reporting what happened, but as something new created through reflection, which is exactly what you’re doing here, Katy.
Something new is made when we write about or make a new piece from our experience of what happened.
There’s a pushback against the Peggy Phelan philosophy that performance is ephemeral and therefore perfectly anti‑capitalist: that you can’t make money from it. Many of us are artists who need to make some money.
So there’s an edge between letting the art be first and also being taken care of.
I’m here looking for work opportunities and ways to bring this work forward, in conventional or unconventional but appropriate places where it can truly serve and be itself.
I don’t want to fit myself into some tiny, distorted version of what the work is just to be understood or consumed.
Fuck that. I want to be consumed – I want to be eaten – but I want to be known for what the food actually is.
Voidspace:
You want to be fully digested.
King Lexie:
Fully digested, yes.
And I know everyone is in different places, and things resonate differently for different people.
So the practice for me is enjoying the freedom of being and enjoying the freedom of who comes to meet the work.
Voidspace:
What other ways are there in which people can experience your creative and therapeutic practice?
King Lexie:
I welcome clients on a rolling basis in Consultório. This practice is often a good fit for creatives, academics, builders, and carers. For instance, when someone has spent too long stuck in their head, running on empty, or disconnected from the body, we work somatically to find a way back.
It’s about closing that gap between envisioned creative work and actual lived reality—but doing it with yourself intact, fostering more buoyancy, resiliency, and possibility. The easiest way in is to book a taster session at theconsultorio.com.
And as for Dream Cage, I plan to take bookings for in it my studio this summer. Booking is strictly by direct invitation. If people were at VSL but couldn’t get a spot, they are officially at the top of the booking call sheet. Just register interest at dreamworlding.com and we’ll be in touch.
And that’s not separate from the question of how to make the work, or where to bring the Cage next.
Are there different iterations? A Praise Cage, a Dream Cage, a Rage Cage? There are many possibilities.
And then: who are the collaborative partners I can rest with; people I trust to take care of parts of the work?
Like you mentioned, it’s difficult and cool to build the entire thing. To sit there thinking, “Fuck, I don’t know how to do trigonometry, but how am I going to build this cage better than the last one?”
And what about when it’s a metal version? Where does that money come from?
Voidspace:
It’s all part of the practice.
As someone whose work involves a lot of creative production, it’s opened my eyes to what “process” really means.
People say, “Trust the process,” but the process is also figuring out where the money comes from, what compromises you can accept, and how to make the work better despite – or because of – limitations.
King Lexie:
Totally.
And the safety of the self, the safety of the performer, the call of the performer, that’s part of it too.
We’re often expected to sacrifice more than anyone would in another job. Forgive the hyperbole, but the feeling is real.
How do we care for ourselves while caring for others so implicitly and genuinely?
What is expendable? What isn’t? Where do I have a no?
There’s this idea that you have to take what you’re given. But that’s not how the world works, and it’s not how this work should work.
Voidspace:
When you’re in an artistic position of care – and I often jokingly call myself Mama Void – it’s easy to become the last item on your own list.
Creative caretaking is fulfilling, but it’s also easy to neglect yourself.
Recognising that and approaching it intentionally is so important.
King Lexie:
Yes.
So to answer both of your questions: the care of the creator is not secondary.
We have to work intelligently to turn that around in the culture, because people are burnt out – educators are burnt out – and there’s less money for programmes.
This isn’t about entertainment or distraction. It’s about care, mutual aid, valuing ourselves.
And with all due respect to the beautiful decorum of you English people, it might be about lessening the self‑effacing instinct and standing inside the work fully.
Because underneath it, when you sit with someone in the cage, their depths are unique but also the same.
Our depths are uniquely ours, but our suffering is shared. Fear of abandonment, fear of shame. These aren’t individual burdens; they’re collective.
So instead of systems that say the Void is something to avoid, we say: start at the Void.
Voidspace:
Start at the Void. That is absolutely something I can get behind.