DREAM AND MAGIC REALISM IN THE THEATRE PLAY: "ERENDIRA & HER GRANDMA" - A PEACOCK IN A WHITE HAMMOCK

Levente Mircea Cociardi
MD, Faculty of Theater and Television, Babes Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, ROMANIA, cociardi.levente.mircea@gmail.com


Abstract

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep", says Prospero (William Shakespeare, The Tempest) and this very stuff ever so often entangles the theatre life and its characters in the hidden worlds, whose masks, in the absence of dreams, we would not (re)cognize. Dreaming has been fascinating the mankind since the expulsion from Eden, like a revelatory form of knowledge, a way of communicating with the intangible world, like a time machine which takes us to the past or to the future or to the inner self and has been faithfully followed by its fellow, history.

The characters of the play "Erendira and her Grandma" embody the case study of this research, based on the magic realism inspired by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez and would not exist without the dream. Any era of human thinking can be defined, profoundly enough, through the relationships is sets between dream and waking (my translation), suggests Albert Béguin (in Romanian, "Sufletul romantic ?i visul", Editura Univers, Bucure?ti, 1998), and from this perspective, this essay is a "radiography" of the intimate resorts of the relationship between the dramatic dream and the organic components of the show, the way in which it has modified, influenced or reconfigured the play we analyse, the mise en scene, the performing art, the rapport between the actors, the mood set in the show and the audience’s response. To capture this, the essay includes a theoretical chapter which records potential definitions for the dream, terminological disambiguation, probable etymologies for referential notions. Furthermore, it embodies some of the most important attempts to systematise the dream universe through classification, theories and relevant patterns for researching the dream from a philosophical, psychoanalytical and neuroscientific perspective.

There are also depicted a couple of cases in which the dream slipped inside the universal dramaturgy, from the Ancient Greek theatre to the Japanese Noh, from the Baroque to the contemporary drama, in order to set the approach, the dramatic clarifications and performance stylistics, to define the theatrical planes and adapting the stage, exploring new ways of aesthetic expression, directorial and interpretive solutions and stylistic correlation.

This chapter of applied research brings to discussion, descriptively and analytically, the dream in "Erendira and her Grandma", a show that has been developed in a two-year workshop of theatrical introspection. Dreams are to the theatre actual "time machines" which make possible and vindicate any temporal "leap", dissolving or suspending chronologies for the benefit of the show. In dreams, characters can visit their past, they can reinvent and relive it and thus gain access to the future. Therein lies the premonitory function of dreams, intensely explored in theatre.

The (il-)logicality of dreams also induces a particular logic to the shows, intimately intertwined with the characters’ disposition and metamophoses brought about by oneiric signals. Oneiric scenes have the latent potentiality of expading the concentrated core of a scenic situation, of detecting other layers, meanings, extents, as well as loosening the informational density. One of the intimate aspects controlled by the dream in a theatre play is the atmosphere, which it can significantly change. Dream is like a window which provides direct acces for the spectators to see inside a character, unveiling inner dinamics which the textual dramatic situations can only hint at.

The aesthetic prints left by the oneiric scenes throughout the theatre play guides the receptor’s sensibility towards the creators’ stylistic choices without being ostentatiously compelling.

Keywords: theatre, dream, Erendira, Márquez, oneiric