Step inside a live, unfinished rehearsal room…
The Things We Dreamed Of… invites audiences into a performance unfolding in real time, where queer recovery becomes an act of imagination, resistance and collective future-making. Co-produced and performed by people in recovery alongside lead artists Jez Dolan and Alana Lake, the work foregrounds process, uncertainty and becoming.
Lake reflects: “Reading through the Recoverist Manifesto, certain words and phrases stayed with me. One stuck with us both – the things we dreamed of…” A title that speaks to desire, longing and the courage to imagine otherwise.
Framed as a rehearsal space, audiences enter a site of preparation and possibility. Together, we create a piece of work that asks us to stay with the process: to observe, listen and sit with uncertainty.
Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the project understands failure as a radical strategy that refuses conventional ideas of success and opens space for other ways of living. As Halberstam writes: “This is a story of art without markets; drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being”. Recovery rarely follows a linear path. It is shaped by repetition, uncertainty, slowness, persistence and care. What might appear as failure can instead become a space for learning, transformation and renewed possibility.
Musicians tune their instruments, dancers warm up and stretch, actors run lines, and a choreographer draws audience members into a series of repeated exercises. Through tuning, stretching, repeating and pausing, the rehearsal room becomes a living enactment of the Recoverist Manifesto: a provocation, a call to action, and a collective rehearsal for futures not yet written.
Together, we rehearse the things we dreamed of…
The Things We Dreamed Of… is a Portraits of Recovery commission, developed and delivered in partnership with the Whitworth.
Recoverist Month, through exhibitions, performances and creative events, places the arts at the centre of conversations on substance use and recovery. Held every September to mark International Recovery Month, this annual programme brings artists, communities and audiences together across venues around the UK, making a vibrant contribution to the contemporary cultural landscape.
About the artists:
Jez Dolan is an artist living and working in Manchester (UK). His practice underlines the intersections between queerness, sexuality, identity and memory. He works across multiple platforms including drawing, performance, printmaking and most recently painting. Dolan’s work is held in several public and private collections internationally including: the British Museum, Bury Art Museum, the (UK) Government Art Collection, the Leslie Lohman Museum NYC, the Schwules* Museum Berlin, the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and others. Jez is also artistic director of Initiative Arts, a Manchester-based company presenting work across the visual and performing arts made by artists who identify as queer.
Alana Lake is an artist whose practice explores desire, addiction and identity through glass, ceramic, metal, expanded drawing and painting. Rooted in queer minimalism, her work considers how repetitive behaviours and contemporary dependencies shape the body, culture and selfhood. Born in Tamworth, Lake studied Photography at Arts University Bournemouth before completing postgraduate study at the Royal Academy Schools, London. She founded the award-winning Berlin project space Gravity Seeks Love, supporting queer practitioners and female-identifying curators, and completed her practice-led PhD, Towards a Pathology of Desire, at Manchester School of Art in 2026.
