THE REALM OF DREAMS, THE LAST MOVE: MECHANISMS OF DREAMING IN THE DRAMATIC UNIVERSE
Levente Mircea Cociardi
MD, Faculty of Theater and Television, Babes Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, ROMANIA, cociardi.levente.mircea@gmail.com
Abstract
People are different from one another not by the neckties they wear or foreign languages they speak, but by the way in which they dream, says the Portuguese poet Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa; we would all be the same were it not for our ability to dream. Inside the incommensurate continent of the dream, theatre has occupied vast territories. The performance analyzed by this study, „The Last Move”, which was inspired by the works of William Saroyan, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Eugène Ionesco andÖrkény István, has two different oneiric plans, a symbolic and psychological one. Its central characters, four actors who refuse to step down from their status of sacrificers of the stage and leave the abandoned theatre destined for demolition, they revisit their pasts, summarize their desires, obsessions, choices and cipher out their destinies in their dreams. Youth’s transience, the search for refuge in dreams and nostalgia, and the reckless generational change, come across as the performance’s main themes, and the characters’ semiology has its correspondent in the dream. By using elements from the universe of Saroyan’s play, the study aims to determine and organize the mechanisms which allow dream scenes to pervade the theatre’s intimate structure. Dream situations can influence the performance’s chemistry in all its components: dramatic, directorial, interpretative, musical, lighting-wise and related to the message transmission. In the postdramatic theatre, the dream is a show with its own identity inside the performance, induced also in order to relax the audience’s perception, to make it penetrable for the intellectual weight of the message. For the understanding of these processes, the paper will submit definitions and classifications of the notion of the dream, from the standpoint of philosophy, psychoanalysis, neurosciences, theatre history. A different perspective of the study comes from the definition of the nightmare and dramatic effects of introducing it into the theatre performance. According to the main thinkers whose writings are questioned by the present study and Saroyan’s drama reflected by the performance, the man is sent to this world in order to dream, and dreams differentiate people. Because by dreaming the man gains dramaturgical ingenuity which allows him to perform simultaneously in multiple theatre plays staged by their spirit and imagination.
Keywords: theatre, dream, Saroyan, time, lonely, oneiric
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