Abstract
In this chapter, David Crespy shares his dreamwork for dramatic writing workshop that he has taught through such venues as the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Hollins University PlayLab, and the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. The work here focuses on dramatic writing, but the notion of the dream cache is useful to any storyteller looking for a creative method to innovate their story technique. Using the lens of phenomenology, and techniques suggested by performance theorist Bert O. States, Crespy attempts to “unmask” the way dreams and fiction interact for the playwright or screenwriter. Dreams offer an unlimited supply of ideas, form, technique, and structure for writers who are trying to surprise themselves out of clichés received from the echo chamber of Broadway and Hollywood. This form of dreamwork is about transforming as a storyteller and changing one’s ideas about what makes an adventurous tale.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “given circumstances” encompasses the entire set of environmental or situational conditions that influence the actions a character in a drama may undertake within the confines of a plot.
- 2.
For a thorough exploration of Bert O. States’ work in dreaming and fiction, see Dreaming and Storytelling (1993), The Rhetoric of Dreams (1988), and Seeing In the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Dreaming (1997).
- 3.
Metadrama is drama about drama itself, or any moment of self-consciousness during which a play points to its own fictional status as a theatrical pretense.
- 4.
Some major writers for film and stage who used dreaming and dreams in their plays include: Eugène Ionesco, famed Absurdist dramatist of The Bald Soprano; Adrienne Kennedy, major African American playwright of Funnyhouse of a Negro; director/writer Christopher Nolan, who used his own lucid dreams for his film Inception; Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories inspired countless films, wrote the wonderful essay, “An Opinion About Dreams,” and based his poetry on his nightmares; Stephen King, who incorporates the symbols he finds in his dreams into his stories, including his novel Dreamcatcher; and Richard Linklater, who drew from his dreams to create the intriguing dream film, Waking Life. Many famous writers in other fields have discussed using dreams as well, including Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Maurice Sendak, Maya Angelou, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Bach, E.B. White, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack Kerouac, H.G. Wells, and Samuel Coleridge, among many others.
- 5.
One of the more inspiring and notable teachers of dreamwork for dramatic writing is Jean-Claude van Itallie, author of The Serpent and several other plays that he created for Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, van Itallie’s chapter “Dreams and Ceremony” in The Playwright’s Workbook (1997) offers useful insights into dreamwork, seen through the ideas of theatre theorist Antonin Artaud, who developed his own vision of “the theatre and its double” through dream exercises in his 1938 work of the same name. Van Itallie continues to teach various kinds of meditation and dreamwork for playwrights and other artists through his Shantigar Foundation (http://www.shantigar.org), which also provides a peaceful place to develop insight into one’s own creative impulses.
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Crespy, D.A. (2018). Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: An Organic Approach to Magic and Theatricality. In: Burgoyne, S. (eds) Creativity in Theatre. Creativity Theory and Action in Education, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78928-6_4
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