What's in a Dream?
The real world and our dream worlds are not as far apart as they seem. This is an old idea. Long before Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, many generations of humans (from Aeschylus to Shakespeare and beyond) have dramatized dreams, feeling them to be a deep well of symbolic meaning that may be plumbed to help make sense of our lives. Indeed, one of the prevailing theories about why humans dream is that it's a way for the brain to simulate responses to unforeseen circumstances. But they're more than that too: dreams don't just show us how to respond to our realities, they also change how we see those realities in the first place. Many arts serve a similar function ("to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature"), and it's this relationship between artistic expression and dreaming that has been occupying my mind this week.
A few days ago, Linda and I saw a mind-bending puppet performance by Maiko Kikuchi called "Daydream Tutorial." The tutorial consisted of ten separate vignettes, and the progression of the skits was indicated by an elevator dial on the projected backdrop that switched between scenes. The artists used many different objects to create puppets including: a tent, a step ladder and mops, RC cars, an overhead projector, folding chairs, lots of cardboard. It was very silly, gestural, self-referential, and repeatedly changed in scale (shrinking and enlarging the main "character" by various means involving transportation of their face onto several puppets along the way). The overall effect of the performance was one of imaginative expansion: it invited the audience to view mundane objects as potentially magical, and it demonstrated that limited material means are no real limits on form for an artist who is willing to scavenge and brave enough to freely allow themself to be weird. Many of the dreams in the show were threatened, interrupted in different ways. However, each daydream did not halt in the face of disturbance, instead incorporating every interruption into the shape (body? house? stage?) of the daydream itself. By the time it was all over, I left that stuffy, brick-walled basement feeling almost like the center of an unfolding universe, curious about every object within sight.
Then yesterday I found myself at another dreamy set of performances by the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble inspired by the art of Frida Kahlo and René Magritte called "In the Eye of a Dream." It was unlike anything I've ever seen. The dancers had such control of their bodies that each dancer always moved their body as a unit, to the degree that even the movement of a finger was clearly connected to the breath, the spine, the pelvis, and the ground. I honestly don't have the technical knowledge to describe what I saw, and even if I did any written description would necessarily be imprecise and stilted by comparison. But even this is dreamlike: being in a space and experiencing that which one cannot fully recount with precision (and, to some degree, not wanting to).
As I continue to make more room in my life for performing, writing, and reading, I've realized it's important to keep reminding myself why I enjoy doing these things in the first place: the opportunity to engage in all these sorts of shared daydreaming and to see the world and myself in a different light because of it.