The Dream Stage: What the Performing Arts Do with Dreams

ze-snow_fot-natalia_kabanow_ast_wroclaw_3jpg.jpg, default, ‘Dyplom ze snów’, directed by Lena Frankiewicz, photo: Natalia Kabanow / AST in Kraków

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What if the theatre isn’t just a building, but a mirror for the sleeping mind? Both rely on a specific psychological trick: the ability to make a lie feel like the absolute truth in real-time. From Shakespeare to avant-garde dance, discover how the stage captures that haunting ‘partial reality’ we usually only find behind closed eyelids.

A girl dreams a nightmare

There is oneiric potential in the classically arranged theatrical situation where we sit in a dark auditorium to watch moving images. Roland Barthes wrote similarly about the cinematic experience, comparing leaving the cinema auditorium to emerging from a state of hypnosis (‘how many members of the cinema audience slide down into their seats as if into a bed’, he asked rhetorically). A dream is sometimes a convention or a narrative frame in theatre, play and performance, to mention such representative and widely discussed examples as the dream visions in Wesele (The Wedding) or Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve). But this motif also appeared in, among others, a little-known but extremely interesting inter-war drama by Felicja Kruszewska titled, unsurprisingly, Sen (The Dream). At first, it is completely dark. After a while, the light flickers on and off a few times. Finally, it comes on, and it is bright. Sen begins, and the opening stage directions of Kruszewska’s play can be heard. In the play, spread over seven images, the main protagonist is the ‘Girl who is dreaming’, a character wandering in her own nightmare. She is visited by an Envoy who, along with a warning of the ‘Black Troops that are about to flood the City’, assigns the Girl an important task: she must awaken the Prince ‘swathed in black clouds’. He is supposed to stop a dangerous invasion and thus ‘defend Poland’. Kruszewska presented a dream within a dream, using the frame narrative to create a socio-political critique that caused quite a scandal not long after the May Coup (the play’s premiere took place in March 1927).

Selling the dream

Scena z przedstawienia "Miasto snu", fot. Magda Hueckel / TR Warszawa — Scene from ‘Miasto snu’, photo: Magda Hueckel / TR in Warsaw

In contemporary theatre, the stage dream convention has been, of course, masterfully practised by Krystian Lupa, who has for years referred in his work not only to psychoanalysis and interpretations based on it but also to the concept of the dreaming body developed by the American therapist Arnold Mindell. In Lupa’s case, dreaminess – which materialises, among other places, during performances (as, for example, in the six-and-a-half-hour Miasto snu [City of Dreams]) – is merged with treating the work on dreams as a method used in the course of rehearsals. The special status of the dream in his work is manifested, for example, in the annotation to the ‘credits’ of the 1997 performance Kuszenie cichej Weroniki (The Temptation of Silent Veronica) in relation to the statements of the character of the Aunt played by Krzesisława Dubielówna that can be found in the script – namely, ‘Auntie’s dreams are the property of Krzesisława Dubielówna’. The dream is thus a special object here, an item subject to ownership rights, demanding that its specific provenance and affiliation be emphasised.

The question of dreams and ownership – by way of free association – leads in turn to a more recent production: Katarzyna Minkowska’s Mój rok relaksu i odpczynku (My Year of Rest and Relaxation), which opened the 2022/2023 season at the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw. Minkowska directed an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel, whose main character decides – with the help of prescribed sleeping pills – to sleep for one year of her life. In the play, her sleep is framed as a work and product of the neoliberal art market, an art installation in a modern gallery. Before the show begins, the sleeping protagonist can be seen in a transparent cuboid set up on Parade Square (Plac Defilad). Even her radical refusal to participate in the rush of productivity is shown by the director as something that the logic of capitalism can easily capture.

Epidemic of dreams

‘IV RP snów’, directed by Dawid Żakowski, photo: Pat Mic / The Grotowski Institute

However, returning to the question of dreaming as a method and fabric in the performing arts, it is worth mentioning that the special status of dreams was recognised during the pandemic. Two works from 2020 are a case in point: Wspólnota śniących (Community of Dreamers), realised by the collective of Maria Magdalena Kozłowska, Magda Kupryjanowicz and Michał Kurkowski, and IV RP snów (IV Polish Republic of Dreams), directed by Dawid Żakowski. Inspired by the phenomenon of ‘pandemic dreams’ (intense dreams observed during an epidemic crisis), Wspólnota śniących is an example that is all the more interesting as it takes place entirely remotely using online tools but is based primarily on the dreaming of the project’s participants. The collective thus problematised the issue of perceiving the theatre as the place, the premiere as the point event, and the theatrical situation as based on a division between the artists being watched and the audience watching. Here, it was impossible to take the position of the spectator – we became members of the Community of Dreamers, receiving successive messages with instructions about our dreams over four days. The following two days of the project involved a remote meeting with the Community based on collective activities such as role-playing and a feedback session.

The other project, IV RP snów, was based on research conducted by psychoanalyst Bartosz Samitowski, which focused on the pandemic dreams of Polish women and men. The researcher was inspired at the time by The Third Reich of Dreams written by journalist Charlotte Beradt, a book on the dreams of female and male citizens of Nazi Germany, published in the mid-1960s. More than a decade later, that publication became the basis for Gordon Lawrence to construct the concept of the Social Dreaming Matrix. The matrices were a key tool for Żakowski’s performance. IV RP snów is based on Samitowski’s collection of dream stories, which willing individuals shared, among others, on a Facebook group. In the performance, their content was embodied by three performers. ‘These are poetic and bloody stories. […] The vast majority oscillate in a totally nightmarish poetics. So there are dead people, blue babies, and there is also a river that ravages the earth’, wrote Dominik Gac in his review.

‘Dyplom ze snów’, directed by Lena Frankiewicz, photo: Natalia Kabanow / AST in Kraków

The theme of scientific research into dreams also appears in Dyplom ze snów (Diploma in Dreams), directed by Lena Frankiewicz, based on a text by Zuzanna Bojda, produced at the Wrocław branch of the Academy of Theatre Arts (premiered February 2023). It is literally a play… made of dreams, as its script is based on the dreams of final-year students. ‘These dreams proved to be super rewarding material for theatre. Because a world of completely offbeat, crazy images was created’, said the director in an interview with Radio Wrocław. The scientific reasoning was theatricalised in the performance directed by Frankiewicz – the whole play was kept in the convention of a research symposium, where specialists in the field of analysing the products of the dream imagination meet (there is also a scene of interpreting the dreams of people present in the audience). The critic Henryk Mazurkiewicz described the chosen convention as ‘a combination of an interactive reality show and a scientific conference’.

Collective sleeping in the studio

‘Stany wyśnione’, concept, choreography: Anna Nowicka, photo: Nowy Teatr

Anna Nowicka, who worked on IV RP snów, is a choreographer, performer and psychology graduate focusing in her work on the relationship between the dreaming body and the dancing body. Nowicka practices methods of working with imaginings and dreams and is also an instructor of the Saphire method, which she learned from psychologist Catherine Shainberg at the School of Images. In 2011, the artist created a performance derived from the dreams of dancers – Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys. It was based on four dreams (one from each dancer).

We worked on embodying dream situations, working them through the body in such a way that content coming from the imagination was experienced and tangibly altered the dancers’ presence, manifesting itself in the form of movement with a specific rhythm and spatial and temporal organisation.

The 2020 performance Migotanie (Flickering) was described by the artist and her collaborators as ‘an attempt to collect scattered fragments of dreams, hopes and desires in order to weave them into a thrilling, flowing, fantastic journey’. In contrast, the structure of an earlier work, 2016’s Stany wyśnione (Dreamt States), was based on the logic of the dream experience, with the audience invited to receive the performance in almost complete darkness, designed to put them in a state close to hypnosis. In an interview with Anka Herbut, the creator said of her work on Stany wyśnione: ‘I also allowed myself to try out activities that I had hitherto taken for granted too much, such as collective sleeping in the studio, waking up in the middle of the night and looking for collective movement’.

Childhood dreams

‘Bataille i świt nowych dni’, directed by Sławek Krawczyński, choreography by Anna Godowska, photo: Aleksandra Osowicz / Art Station Foundation

Nowicka derived her interest in dreams from the practice of Anna Godowska, dancer, choreographer and educator, co-founder – together with Sławomir Krawczyński – of the Bretoncaffe Theatre, inspired by the poetics and theoretical foundations of Surrealism, its focus on the subconscious and the logic of dreams. Godowska and Krawczyński have been working on the Mindell-inspired research and art project Taniec śniącego ciała (Dance of the Dreaming Body) since 2005. The first performance created within that project was presented a year later. Its basis was the childhood dreams of the dancers engaged in the performance. During many years of reflection, the duo has consistently forged further tools for their performances and actions. Examples of their use can be seen in performances such as – among others – Bataille i świt nowych dni (Bataille and the Dawn of New Days) from 2016, a performance devised for six dancers in which the thought of the French philosopher Georges Bataille inspired the methods of working with dreams and the unconscious, or Hamlet. Sen (Hamlet: The Dream), the solo work of a year later in which Godowska performed (here, the iconic text by Shakespeare and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were used as a foundation).

The dream, as such, is a special tool because it is democratic. After all, we all have dreams (although we often do not remember them). Of course, developing opening and safe methods of working with night dreams is a separate, complex issue. After all, dreaming is one of the most delicate yet most powerful spheres of the human psyche and worth handling advisedly.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

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