2. Franz Kafka – A kastély, A per
Castle, The Trial
These works by Kafka helped me to better understand the origins of the feeling of anxiety in my dreams and showed me a way of describing the sense of complete disorientation and pointlessness without being aware of them consciously.
3. Milan Kundera – A lét elviselhetetlen könnyűsége
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I think this was the first book that I could identify with concerning the dream descriptions. It shows the ways how the sub/unconscious self processes and very powerfully reflects on problems of our lives in the form of these fictional dreams.
4. Janne Teller – Ha háború lenne nálunk
War, What If It Were Here?
Addresses the reader in the second person form to achieve a more direct effect on their emotional world, making it easier to identify with the story, and to emphasize the importance of compassion.
Breaks the linearity of narration and offers both the possibility of a subjective reading experience and of following an intentional order between the chapters.
6. Sigmund Freud – Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Some of Freud’s theories can be considered old-fashioned and outdated, but this was a very inspiring reading for me, as Freud was the first to take dreams seriously and acknowledge them as important parts of our inner emotional and psychic lives.
7. Péter Popper – Színes pokol
Colorful Hell
A work about how the imagination or the fantasy of an artists’ (mostly theatre makers’) work. This essay reveals different types of actors and the schizophrenic aspect of acting and how one can deal with it or be driven crazy. One part of this writing stuck with me the most. Popper writes about the loneliness of those who create with their minds and feelings: a young girl talking about a bad dream in which her mother was also present, and when she realized her mother could not recall the dream, since it was only hers, she did became confused and desperate. The shock of realizing that one’s own reality is almost completely separated from the rest of the world.
8. Gyula Krúdy – Álmoskönyv – Tenyérjóslások könyve
Dream book – Book of Palmistry
This is a collection of folklore beliefs about which things symbolize certain happenings, for example losing one’s teeth means approaching death, and dreaming about making love in a bridedal gown means a life led on the wrong path. I wouldn’t consider it as a reliable source for dream interpretation but more as an evidence that people have long since been concerned about the meaning of their dreams, and the dream-happenings collected in this book were once a usual or reappearing pattern for many people.
9. Mircea Eliade – Myths, Dreams and Mysteries
A very small part of this book is about ‘waking dreams’ and makes a connection between religious archaic reality and dreams. For me, it was a starting point for thinking about how close we are to our dreams; it seems an indication that there were times when humanity used to lived closer to their inner selves and acknowledged dreams as full-value parts of life to gain spiritual progress for their own sake.
10. Richard Schechner - The future of the ritual
This essay by Schechner states that rituals and theatre were strongly interlinked and affected each other throughout history, but it also does differentiates the purpose and the means of the two genres.
The essay also mentions the importance of the ability to dream in a sense that involves conscious and unconscious fantasy, remembering one’s dreams and being able to recount them.
11. Mircea Eliade – The Sacred and the Profane
Taming chaos and creating cosmos. Differentiating places that offer connection with other levels of existence and those that do not. And describing the ways people perceive time when getting as close to that other level of existence as possible. How does one separate something spatially and temporally from the self-serving everyday actions, and what does that mean? And how is it possible?
12. Ildikó Boldizsár – Meseterápia
Tale Therapy
This book articulates a method of identifying symbolic problems, characters and locations in tales with feelings, people and situations that occur in our lives. I found this reading incredibly useful, because I could use the method for interpreting my own dreams. It was also the first thing that led me to further investigate the relationship between symbolism and psychology in connection with dreams.
13. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp – A mese morfológiája
Morphology of the Tale
This work is mostly about fairy tales, in the sense that the stoories somehow involve magic, and that magic essentially defines the direction of the narration. In this approach, the fairy tales have ‘functions’ of restoring the order of the world after a conflict that is depicted in the introduction.
The work also discusses double meanings in these tales and the function of repeating a certain part of the text over and over; this is a pattern that has occurred many, many times in my dreams, and I would thus say that these dreams mostly do have functions, if nothing more than to draw your attention to a certain problem’s existence or to confront you with something that you are actually uncomfortable with.
14. Carl Gustav Jung – Álom és lelkiismeret
Dream and Conscience
This was the first of Jung’s wroks that I read and thus the first time I encountered the idea of the collective unconscious. It also helped me to not want to identify everything with one certain, fixed thing in my dreams and helped me become aware that some things symbolize more like a circle of questions rather than one exact thing. Some things need time to reveal their meaning, and that can very much be layered.
15. Marie-Louise von Franz – Az álmok útján
The Way of the Dream
A book created after a series of interviews with Marie Louise von Franz, Jung’s most famous student, about dreams and their analysis. She interprets random dreams based on her previous experience and dreams from mythology and history. It is like a culture-anthropological safari about dreams and their significance from Gilgamesh to the present days.
16. Jean Shinoda Bolen – Goddesses in Everywoman
In this work, Bolen creates archetypes based on Jungian psychology and Greek mythology. This reading helped me to recognize those behavioural patterns both in my dreams and my waking life that I am not comfortable with and solve the riddle of why these energies disturb me and how can I confront and thereby ‘tame’ and honour them in order to be able to access the powers they offer.
17. Akron Hajo Banzhaf – A Crowley-Tarot
The Crowley- Tarot
I am fully aware of the fact that involving esoterica, astrology and alchemy in an artistic research can be controversial, but let’s face it: artistic research is a controversial expression in itself.
Akron Hajo Banzhaf analyses the cards based on the writings of Crowley and adds additional information from the mythical traditions of the west, older Tarot representations, the I Ching, numerology, and astrology, and associates feelings, sensations, seasons, music and literature with them. Hajo Banzhaf contextualizes every card in a thousand years of cultural history and pays attention to every detail on the cards, considering every occurring symbol and linking them with Jungian psychology and the material of the collective unconscious.
18. David Tudor – curator: Christina Penetsdorfer
Teasing Chaos
An exhibition in the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, that introduced and revived the lifetime work of David Tudor, has inspired this scene.
1. Teresa of Ávila – A belső várkastély
Interior Castle/The Mansions
This book led me to understand the benefits of contemplation from a psychic perspective and helped me realize that I was doing this with material animation when I used the technique to consider my dreams in a more embodied way.
A. Jacques Rancière
‘Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting, when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.’
The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2011), 13.
B. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
When they shut her down the Russians moved in
I'm too scared. I'm too scared to even walk on past.
Jubilee Street, Push the Sky Away (Hammersmith, London: Mute Song Ltd., 2013)
And this is the moment, this is exactly where she is born to be
and this is what she does and this is what she is.
Rings of Saturn, Skeleton Tree (New York: The Orchard Music, 2016)
I believe in God
I believe in mermaids too
I believe in 72 virgins on a chain (why not, why not)
I believe in the Rapture
For I've seen your face
On the floor of the ocean
At the bottom of the rain
Mermaids, Push the Sky Away (Hammersmith, London: Mute Song Ltd., 2013)
Jesus lying in his mother’s arms,
is a photon released from a dying star
We move through the forest at night
The sky is full of momentary light
And everything we need is just too far
...
And we lie among our atoms and I speak to you of things
And hope sometimes that maybe you will understand
There is no order here and there is no middle ground
Nothing can be predicted and nothing can be planned
We are fireflies pulsing dimly in the dark
We are here and you are where you are
We are here and you are where you are
Fireflies, Ghosteen (New York: The Orchard Music, 2019)
C. Alan Watts (1971)
[…] allow yourself to hear
All the sounds that are going on around you
Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world
As if you were listening to music
Don't try to identify the sounds you are hearing
Don't put names on them
Simply allow them to play with your eardrums
And let them go
In other words, you could put it
Let your ears hear whatever they want to hear
Don't judge the sounds
There are no, as it were, proper sounds or improper sounds
And it doesn't matter if somebody coughs or sneezes
Or drops something
It's all just sound
Alan Watts, Boreta, Superposition – “Listen, Dream” (Oakland: Bandcamp, 2019)
D. Nicolas Bourriaud
‘Artistic activity, for its part, strives to achieve modest connections, open up (one or two) obstructed passages, and connect levels of reality kept apart from one another.’
Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998), 8.
E. Casey O’Callaghan
‘Sounds themselves... are particular individuals that possess the audible qualities of pitch, timbre, and loudness... They enjoy lifetimes and bear similarity and difference relations to each other based on the complexes of audible qualities they instantiate.’
Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 17.
F. Nicolas Bourriaud
‘Critical materialism: The world is made up of random encounters (Lucretius, Hobbes. Marx, Althusser) . Art, too, is made up of chaotic, chance meetings of signs and forms. Nowadays, it even creates spaces within which the encounter can occur. Present-day art does not present the outcome of a labour, it is the labour itself. Or the labour-to-be.’
Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998), 110.
G. Richard Schechner
‘The same may be said about theater. Theater and ritual comprise a braided twin-system (see Schechner, 1977). Each is present in the other. Certain cultures, historical periods and individual genres emphasize the one or the other. The fundamental distinction between theater and ritual is functional. Ritual is efficacious; it claims a direct and measurable effect on the world. Theater is entertainment. In ritual action begets action; in theater, action begets thoought. But since ritual and theater are a double system, all theatrical performances have the ambition to affect action, and all rituals seek to entertain and stimulate thought. What distinguishes one from the other in any given performance is context, including what the audience expects, who the sponsoring agents are and what occasion for the performance is.’
The Future of the Ritual (Pittsburgh: Journal of Ritual Studies, 1987, winter) Vol. 1, No. 1, 16.
H. Claire Bishop
‘ [...] artistic practice can no longer revolve around the construction of objects to be consumed by a passive bystander. Instead, there must be an art of action, interfacing with reality, taking steps – however small – to repair the social bond.’
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. (New York: Verso books, 2012) 11.
I. Jacque Rancière
‘ [...] those in attendance learn from as opposed to being seduced by images; where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs [...] He will be shown a strange, unusual spectacle, a mystery whose meaning he must seek out. He will thus be compelled to exchange the position of passive spectator for that of scientific investigator or experimenter, who observes phenomena and searches for their causes.’
2011.The Emancipated Spectator. (New York: Verso. 2011), 4.
J. Antal Szerb
‘Then on top of this came the worst symptom of all: the whirlpool. Yes, I really mean whirlpool. Every so often I would have the sensation that the ground was opening beside me, and I was standing on the brink of a terrifying vortex. You mustn’t take the whirlpool literally. I never actually saw it; it wasn’t a vision. I just knew there was a whirlpool there. At the same time I was aware that there wasn’t anything there, that I was just imagining it — you know how convoluted these things are. But the fact is, when this whirlpool sensation got hold of me I didn’t dare move, I couldn’t speak a word, and I really believed it was the end of everything.’
Journey by Moonlight (Richmond, London: Alma Classics, Len Rix’s translation, 2021), 18-19.
K. Áron Birtalan
‘Becoming the unprecedented
We must embody our actions. We must create experiences that challenge us, open us, help us to become brave, vulnerable, strange, messy. We must resist the urges to ‘progress’, to ‘innovate’, but also to ‘regress’ and to ‘reenact’. We must not be linear, but mutant, porous, and sentient.
In a world, where governments and corporations live off of prescribing and predicting our lives, let us become the unpredictable, the unprecedented, the incidental.
not a tool
We resist the compulsion to utilise imagination as a tool to achieve a goal. We oppose the commodification of experiences by capitalist metrics in order for them to be market-ready. We oppose wrapping lived experience in decorative discourse or the act of reducing them to a mere spectacle to represent and reinforce existing narratives.
We are not here to argue or present evidence of our practices and experiences but to let them account for themselves. However, we do realise traces that lie outside a product-oriented mindset are often hard to notice and engage with. We are dedicated not just to practices of creating, but also to practices of new ways of listening, and noticing and connecting.
[...]
To us, practising imagination is not escapism, but a practice of survival.’
2021. Imagination is never neutral.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_vEUrlCciWrk1PkTzbQDC996oxxuAtwSHuVH3FR9_1I/edit Last accessed on 21 May 2023.
23. Lekapcsolom a villanyt a fejemben - Common vibez x Várkonyi csibészek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv4bTfBR6jA
Original song by Bajdázó
My translation.
A. Marie-Louise von Franz
‘If you notice an unconscious fantasy coming up within you, you would be wise not to interpret it at once. Do not say that you know what it is and force it into consciousness. Just let it live with you, leaving it in the half-dark, carry it with you and watch where it is going or what it is driving at.’
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Revised Edition (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2017), 107.
B. Carl Gustav Jung
‘The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.’
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Volume 8.: Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 158.
C. Sigmund Freud
‘Where, in fact, are we to find the meaning of these dream symbols if the dreamer himself can give no information concerning them, or at best can give only incomplete information?’
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
(https://www.sigmundfreud.net/introduction-to-psychoanalysis-pdf-ebook.jsp – Last accessed 17 May 2023), 123.
D. Mircea Eliade
‘But a difficulty remains. There is continuity between the functions fulfilled and messages transmitted by certain symbolism to the deepest layers of the unconscious and the meanings that they reveal upon the plane of the “purest” spiritual activity.’
Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 120.
Other writings and creations that should be mentioned because they’ve been important inspiration
Oskar Schlemmer – Man and Art Figure
Bodies as forms, objects as bodies, forms of objects and objects movement in space, treating every technical detail of the performance as equally important sovereign entities. 1921.
Walter Gropius – The Theater of the Bauhaus
Especially Chapter 3: László Moholy-Nagy Theater, circus, variety in particular: ‘Score Sketch for Mechanical Eccentric’
1971.
Alexander Vantournhout, Bauke Lievens, Raphaël Billet – Raphäel
Another step towards the thought of humans and objects being completely equal and interchangeable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYdZGoCjVS4
2017.
Paul Piris – The Co-Presence and Ontological Ambiguity of the Puppet
This book really thinks about the philosophical and aesthetic implications of the manipulator and the puppet being visibly present on the stage at the same time. What layers of meanings are added to a performance and how do actual shows play with this situation? How can the philosophical problematics of the Self and the Other be experimented with?
2014, Routledge.
Peter Schumann – What, At the End of This Century, Is the Situation of Puppets & Performing Objects?
A flow of thoughts about how we treat objects that surround us, and what the object’s revenge is. The abusive use of ‘things’.
1999. The Drama Review
Edina Ellinger - Subjective Object
Analysing the functional object theatre. Differentiating figurative and functional object animation depending on how we relate to the given performing object.
2017.