Fear, Incorporated: The Transformative Theatrics of Living

"Never ever forget that you are the future of this country…You mustn't be frightened of life, it's a very exciting life because you can make your dreams come true" Pieter-Dirk Uys, from the documentary Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story

“In the end it will be up to audiences each time in the event because they will determine the stories,” says Diamond. “My hope is that we have the courage, in a way, not to look at how to change that thing out there, but how to change ourselves.”

That self-reflexive and socially conscious attitude has defined the theatre company right from its humble beginnings in Vancouver in 1981, and it continues to exemplify creative leadership around the most sensitive topics in contemporary public debate. Diamond’s first prominent role in the company, as associate director of the 1982 production Right to Fight, addressed affordable housing. Later, Diamond wrote The Enemy Within, which satirized B.C. politics in 1986. Two years later, he had his directorial debut for the company with one of its Power Plays, which use theatre games and exercises to explore social issues and create community-specific theatre.

Corporations in Our Heads is one of Diamond’s more experimental works in his effort to reach out to community through art. Based on the work of Brazilian theatre visionary Augusto Boal, creator of Theatre for the Oppressed, Diamond’s new work is an original interpretation of Boal’s Cops in the Head, but takes an entirely different approach. “The rules of the Theatre of the Oppressed, I’ve thrown them right out the window,” says Diamond.

The production asks Calgary residents to reflect on, share, act on and change the dominant messages that influence society . “The reason to do the thing for me is there’s a lot of good work happening out there on how the messages of corporations affect our consuming,” says Diamond. “But I don’t think we’re doing a lot of talking about how those messages affect our own images, not just of ourselves but of our relationships with each other. And it’s at the relationship level, in fact, that our consuming originates.

Corporations in Our Heads will be facilitated by (or “joked by,” as Theatre for Living puts it) Diamond himself, who incites the audience to participate. “The power of it, for me, is that it really is a democratic thing,” he says. “While we are framing the general subject matter, Corporations in Our Heads, the actual content really is going to be determined by the people who enter the room that night. And nobody — not me, not the sponsoring groups, nobody — is going to be able to predetermine the content.”

This article, titled, New theatre work examines corporate psychology, continues where it was originally published on November 7 in Fast Forward Weekly. The piece is a continuity on the theme presented by Pieter-Dirk Uys and his arts activism in South Africa, as David Diamond represents a similar following in social consciousness and public engagement in Canada.

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Chinatown Delight

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Following the trend of the album, Sketches of Style, this sounding is an amalgamation of three instrumental improvisations harmonized and syncopated together with a synthetic rhythm. The beat creeps in, reminding the listener of the abstract organ that touches on soul, as the reeded music blends with darbuka.

Originally published in a comic, the poem that led to the musical expression of the same title, "find Inspiration!" first appeared in Maad Sheep, an illustrated print publication of cartoon and literature that I once found while sitting in an open-air cafe. The issue in which my piece was featured was displayed at a Comic Convention in Canada.

Lyrically, the piece is a foray into the bitter savagery that cooks the great mass of minds; all who are saturated by the consumptive bread of modern life. The challenge of simply being creative in confrontation with the overwhelming burst and pop mirrorscape of infinite self-deception is the subject and of this sketch of style.

The rest of the chapbook is a fourteen page collection of poetry on the subject of gaining respect and appreciation for the superhuman qualities of nature, as more than grandiose, and more than human intellect and possession could ever capture or convey. Many are observational, and drawn from insights into the ground of being as the naked soul of humanity.

Nature’s Supernal Creation

Food for the Imagination: Contributor Article Completes Sketches of Style

Dream Cuisine by RK

I am happy to present the first contributor article to SoJourn(al): Private Dreams to Public Art. I am especially proud to present this article because it speaks to many themes in the life of the Dream Author. I have been a vegetarian for over seven years, many of which were spent in the Middle East and Latin America, which posed interesting challenges. 

Nonetheless, I stayed true to a time in my life when I was thoroughly exposed to interpretive experience. My mental development was spurred on by alternative living practices, founded on a diet of psychoactive compounds and creative literature. Maintaining an alternative diet has been an essential ingredient in living a life based on principles of subtle recollection and acute awareness. 

Blurring the separation between external causes and their internal effects has been a lifelong inquiry. The experience of how foods have an impact on the subtle realms of dreaming is an invaluable source of critical thinking. As Terence McKenna put it, to "dissolve boundaries" is a natural step towards creative thinking, and becoming a seer of "true hallucinations" of which dreaming is an integral example.  

Food for the Body Equals Food for the Imagination

When Scrooge was visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, he believed that he was dreaming and put the apparition that stood before him down to ‘an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.’ ‘There’s more of gravy than of grave about you,’ he joked. The idea that foods can influence our dreams has featured heavily in literature throughout the years. There is a commonly held belief that what is going on in a person’s digestive system can have an affect upon his or her subconscious mind during sleep. To what extent is this true though? Can eating the wrong thing really plunge somebody into a world of nightmares?

Does Cheese Give you Bad Dreams?

There is significant evidence to suggest that eating healthily can help to keep a person’s mind to remain healthy. According to the Dieticians of Canada, maintaining a healthy diet can reduce irritability and mood swings and increase an individual’s ability to concentrate. Does this only apply to when people are awake though or does it also make a difference when they are dreaming? The food that has the strongest association with nightmares is undoubtedly cheese. However a study carried out by British researchers in 2005 suggests that there is actually no correlation between cheese consumption and bad dreams. The results of the study actually indicate that different varieties of cheese are capable of inducing specific types of pleasant dream, for example cheddar cheese is thought to lead to dreams about celebrities. The good dreams that cheese can bring about are believed to be due to the fact that it contains the amino acid tryptothan, which is commonly linked to a reduction in stress.

A report published in the Folklore sociology and anthropology journal questions whether the idea that cheese causes nightmares is linked in some way to its association to witches in literature. In ancient Roman writing, women who were viewed as potential sexual partners were referred to as ‘cheese’. In eleventh century English literature, several stories about ‘night witches’ came into being that included references to cheese. Folklore suggests that this was used to imply that the witches had a sexual element to them and wished to corrupt their victims by exposing them to sin. The report puts this forward as a possible reason that cheese might have ended up being blamed for bad dreams.

Spicy Foods

Spicy foods are also thought to lead to nightmares, which is backed up by the results of a study that was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology in which a group of healthy men were given spicy foods to eat before they went to sleep. They were observed to have a more restless night’s sleep than they did when they had not consumed any spicy foods before they went to bed. The author of the study speculated that this could have been due to the fact that the spicy foods had elevated the internal body temperature, causing the discomfort to work its way into the participants’ subconscious and leading to bad dreams.

Unhealthy Foods

Research cited by Justine Sterling of food magazine Meatpaper indicates that consuming foods that are high in sugar or fat immediately before going to bed can lead to nightmares. The study also indicates that going to bed on a full stomach can bring about bad dreams and low blood sugar caused by going for a prolonged period without eating can lead to vivid nightmares. This is because the body releases adrenaline when it is desperately hungry, which translates into the subconscious.

Mustard

Mustard was another foodstuff that Scrooge blamed for Marley’s appearance – and with good reason as well, as a study carried out by researchers at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, indicates that consuming it can result in nightmares. The researchers concluded that this is probably because it contains capsaicin, which can change the body’s temperature and lead to discomfort. It appears that what we eat really can affect the way that our minds work once we have passed over into the land of sleep. Perhaps cheese was not the main culprit in the case of Scrooge though; maybe Marley was merely a result of too much mustard before bed.

Evelyn Donaldson is a mother of two and full-time writer. She grew up in Idaho, but now lives in Kansas. She recently became vegetarian and has long been interested in dreams and their interpretations.

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My blanket drifts up into sky, its multicolored fabric bleeds scarlet and lime into the nearing front of storm clouds gathering. The wind-whipped fabrics touch and scatter the bedroom floor, above without ceiling, empty unto the grandiose firmament. I wake to the numbing air, as on a mountain summit, where the thunder resonates in delicate cyclones. As I rise, the storm pierces the earth with overgrown fingernails of Zeus. A crepuscular storm, breathing in an unwelcome morning, filled with signs of a new god. 

Jupiter and Semele by Sebastiano Ricci

And the machines of war rape our Earth. Nazi terror sweeps as the witch’s broom throughout the countless, destroyed Jewish homes of Europe. My family is strangled and sucked clean through the medical tubes of an astral fire as hot as the blunt knives of torture. I escape. To Russia, I follow the blank news pages with a heart kept earnest. Directions swarm as the buzzing of toxic insects, and my rivals are blended as fruit sap in the teeth of metallic pincers. 

Nude II by Willy Fick

In the heart of Russia, I am free; yet full with a dark heart. The Earth trembles and fades each day with a transparent rush of nostalgia. I wish and writhe for the beating hearts of my beloved mother and father, sisters and brother. The wedding feasts and blind bliss, how we gorged on the salt of the seven seas with triumphant abandon. Every day, there was a moment of repose.

Cigarette Seller (Wandering Jewish Man) by Dome Skuteczky

We knew the day might come, when all would be rent, cleansed by the impotent flood of mad war. Should I wander further astray, eastward to the cold forest sands of Siberia, or westward, to the commercial forge of America, and sleep by the pill of forgetfulness? Lost again, if found anew, will I be recognized? 

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Sketches of Style by

As per SoJourn(al) tradition, I have prepared a free PDF for the entire Sketches of Style collection which has been excerpted in the past few months in complement to my dream writings. 

Enjoy! 

Who we are in Dream; are we in Life?

"Who you are in Dream is not who you are in Life."

I find myself echoing a statement made by Tyler Durden in "Fight Club"

Yet this is my experience: there is a more subtle interplay of consciousness woven through "dream" than in that it simply ends upon waking.

Dream crosses over into our waking consciousness as does our Life into dream. The greater one realizes this, the less important things become which are predicated upon the line where waking becomes sleep and vice versa. The realization that Dreaming is, in a sense, a refined way of living, and that its genuine energy, which makes purely mental creations on us while inwardly fixated on our most natural processes, can occur at any time when the mind is used accordingly. Dream is a finer interpretation of the mundane mind by the human heart.

When Dream crosses over into the awake mind, we are creating music, writing inventively, singing passionately, thinking imaginatively, etc.

Life feeds into our dreaming when asleep, in our most vulnerable state of mind, we involuntarily re-live personal desires, social obligations or anxious occurrences in the guise of the mind's own conceptual spin stripped of normal sensory perception.

So, when one goes beyond mere "lucid dreaming" and interacts with a newfound sense of their Dream, as where the their dreaming is united in all aspects of the mind, whether awake or asleep, that person may be known to adopt strange habits such as going under pseudonyms (such as myself) or more overtly in simply taking their lives into their own hands, speaking their mind and dedicating their time to what they are passionate about, what unites them with an eternally alive Dream, that is at the crux of creation in a profound relationship to something actual as opposed to the appealing to what is currently acceptable in its concave, boxed-in drudgery of a life lived without dreaming. For Dream is Spirit, it is the true Source of Life, and ground within which all life must inevitably resolve.