LEAD ARTICLE: choreography and creativity

by w. gordon lawrence

 

This paper will be published in Framemakers Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change, Daghdha Dance Company, 2008

To ‘choreograph’ is to arrange bodies in time and space, as in a dance sequence. A wider meaning is arranging relations between such bodies. ‘Choreography’ is the act of framing relations between bodies, as external objects or entities, and becomes a way of seeing the world. Such a dynamic constellation can be consciously created, or not, can emerge into being self-organising or super-imposed (Framemakers, 2004).

The focus in this essay is on the ‘conscious, or not’ framing of relationships. The ‘or not’ is taken to refer to the unconscious. In particular the issue being addressed is the relationship between the unconscious mind and dreaming as a guide to, even a model of, framing, or choreographing, relationships between not only bodies and phenomena but also ideas and thought in the world of reality.

Choreography, in the broadest sense, is shaped in the mind through the unconscious and imagination. One theme of this essay is to identify the sources of imaginative thinking and framing of ideas. The theatre of dreams, while sleeping, is an unrivalled source of creativity and imagination. Dreams arise from the unconscious mind which is to be seen positively and as life-giving. W.B. Yeats’ injunction to tread softly on dreams is to be taken very seriously because dreaming, and thinking about the meaning of the dream, allows us to go ‘beyond the frames’ (Lawrence, 1985). Seeing the dream as a shard of creation waiting to be realized – not to be trodden on but prized – allows for creative thinking and thought to be born.

Neurobiological research since the 1990s has been pursuing the idea that the mind acts back on the brain to cause physical changes (Begley, 2007). This morphing process can be encouraged by thinking about thinking, the unconscious mind and dreaming. By thinking about the unconscious and dreaming the processes of the mind and the brain are enhanced and sharpened, or refined, to become an effective tool for framing new understanding and insight of relations between bodies, or ideas.

Unconscious thinking takes place, as a virtual parallel universe, all the time for humans as they pursue their daily activities. It is ‘a particular form of thinking’, according to Freud (1900). The unconscious is characterized by timeless-ness and placeless-ness inducting humanity into the infinite. Symbolism it produces through displacement and condensation by the paradoxical juxtaposition of opposites (Grotstein, 2001). This is why the subjective experience of dreaming is often bizarre, surreal, and disturbing of the taken-for-granted logic of daily life. Dream communicates to the conscious mind through visual images which are used instead of words. The messages are in the form of ideograms or symbolism and lack the exactness of written or spoken lexis (Lopez-Corvo, 2006).

Dreaming needs to have its cryptic messages transformed into thought, otherwise they would not be communicated. As we recount a dream we are putting it into words that, inevitably, are a lie for we are always trying to get at the truth of a dream which is unattainable. There is always a navel in a dream, ‘one spot in every dream that is unplumbable’, which is its ‘point of contact with the unknown’ (Freud, 1900). We shall never know the absolute truth but it is the effort to attain it by thinking that stretches our minds to makes us human.

The working hypothesis is that anything creative, e.g., choreography, in the widest sense, will have its roots in the unconscious mind evinced through dreaming which is transformed into thought in consciousness. That thought is translated into action through the process of imagination resulting in dance, a poem, a painting or any work of literature or scientific discovery. Dreaming is an unconscious re-framing of the relations among objects and phenomena in the world.

Further differences between consciousness and the unconscious
The unconscious, and dreaming, makes for awareness of the irrational that is never constrained by the logic of rationality. Mark Rothko, the American painter, wrote ‘the irrational quality of inspiration, [the] finding between the innocence of childhood and the derangement of madness that true insight which is not accorded to normal man’ (Rothko, 2004) was a source of creativity for him. Choreography becomes inventive when the irrational, the unconscious and dreaming are treated seriously, valued, and not despised, when we listen to, and pay attention to, the inner voice of our minds, both individually and collectively, causing us to reframe the world of consciousness.

‘The governing rules of logic carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of the Illogical’ wrote Freud in 1900. Pursuing this insight Ignacio Matte-Blanco made an intellectual leap by working out the different logics used in waking consciousness and the unconscious while asleep. Consequently, the unconscious can be seen in a positive light.

While we are awake and conscious the human mind uses finite sets (Matte-Blanco, 1975, 1988). The classic is the 3Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic). The logic of these is indisputable and the resultant rules have allowed human kind to communicate. Finite sets are used to distinguish things and phenomena using true or false propositions. The conscious mind is always making propositions to itself about the relationship of one object to another. These are triads: self-as-subject (one), object – thing or phenomenon – (two), and the remaining (third) entity. The mind contains a vast reservoir of triads that constitute finite sets which that are the basis of scientific thinking. These allow humans to carry out classificatory activities in their minds. These finite sets are deployed asymmetrical logic in consciousness.

By contrast the unconscious operates on symmetrical logic when the finite sets are relaxed through sleep and humans are temporally paralyzed. Then the infinite sets of the unconscious come to be mobilized. There are no limits to these sets which allows the person to be in infinity. Symmetric logic is used by the unconscious and all experiences are fused into a one-ness. This is the radical nature of the unconscious which is based on a totally different logic from consciousness.

Two distinctions: in consciousness the ‘I’, or ego, is all important because the emphasis is on the ‘management of the self in role’ (Lawrence, 1979). When the unconscious holds sway ego-lessness becomes the state of the individual as she submerges into the unconscious.

The other paradox is the antinomy of the conscious and unconscious. It is by internalizing this antinomy that we are human. By freeing ourselves from the chains of the rational, new vistas are opened for us as the unconscious opens new ways of examining reality to foster the development of the mind by accepting synchronicity and being alert to shadows of the future.

There is a self-organising choreography of the unconscious which will have a pattern that connects it. It is in discerning this pattern that new knowledge is made. This choreography is made possible through the way that the unconscious operates.

Whereas in consciousness the perceptual input is mathematic symbols, signs and words, in dreaming, the pure experience of the unconscious, the input is almost pure imagery. In consciousness we work with logical relationships, e.g. if A then B, but the unconscious works with almost pure picture metaphor. In consciousness the boundaries are thick with solid division and categorization, but in the unconscious boundaries are merged, and there is a loosening of categories with thin boundaries. In consciousness processing of ideas, etc. is relatively serial but in the unconscious these are spontaneously auto-associative, just as the sequence of ideas or images are connected in a linear fashion, e.g. A>B>C.>D, but are multi-related in the unconscious.

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CREATIVITY
Neurobiologists tell us that the bandwidth of consciousness is our ability to transmit information, measured in ‘bits’ per second. This is much too narrow to register all the information. We process around 14 million bits of information per second as human organisms relating to our environment. (A ‘bit’ is weightless, colourless, has no size and can travel at the speed of light. ‘It is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information’ [Negroponte, 1995]). But the bandwidth of consciousness is around 18 bits. This means that we have conscious access to a small percentage (about a millionth) of the information we routinely use to survive. The vast bulk of information humans use to make decisions is captured by the unconscious mind. Therefore, as Anton Ehrenzweig found, ‘the undifferentiated structure of unconscious vision…displays scanning powers that are superior to conscious vision’ (Ehrenzweig, 1967).

We intuit the link between the unconscious and creativity. The best detailed description of the actual process comes from Einstein, reported by Matte-Blanco, on the discovery of special relativity theory. He said that words or language did not play any role in the mechanism of thought. Rather, the physical entities which act as elements of thought are certain signs and images which are more or less clear enough to be reproduced and combined. These mental images of the object of thought are emotionally manipulated independently in imagination. The emotional basis of this rather vague play is the desire to arrive at logically connected concepts. Once this play is established, Einstein goes on to describe the laborious search for words that are analogous to the logical connections implicit in the emotional play with images. Following this route, he arrives ultimately at mathematical formulations.

Einstein started from an emotional state expressed in images and sensations to arrive at a purely intellectual and highly abstract conception. In short, if emotion is the mother of invention, through the transformation of the thinking in the images, father is the unconscious.

The unconscious because of its unique functioning presents new configurations of relations between objects in the environment and phenomena and also between ideas and concepts. These new relations come from an apparently random configuration. This synchronous configuration will have a pattern that connects it. It is the thinking embedded in this pattern that has to be discerned and transformed into rational thinking and thought. This is how finite knowledge is wrested from the infinite into which the unconscious has inducted us. That pattern can be construed as a choreography leading through transformation to a different framing of the material from the unconscious.

This is the ‘guts’ of creativity: unconscious life, novel configurations of unconscious material, e.g. dreaming, discerning the pattern that connects them, recognition of the synchronous choreography, transformation into thought, leading to new discoveries in the world of reality.

DREAMING
Dreaming as a mental activity is nature’s way of experimenting with alternative versions of reality. Dreaming has a ‘research’ function because the mind rehearses how the human is to relate to, and with objects in, its environment. It also has a defensive ‘escapist’ function. Both are needed for the human being to survive as an organism. ‘Longing for a more ideal world, a wish for a more perfect union with one’s love object, in fact a search for the paradise lost of infant love is, I think, an essential aspect of human nature’ (Sodre, 1999).

Life began with one cell organisms and the hunch is that such organisms engaged in a proto-dreaming of themselves in relation to their eco-environment so that they could ‘think’ how to adapt to that environment and so evolve through dreaming the ‘bright idea’. This can only be a hunch, a guess, which, probably, never can be tested scientifically.

The hypothesis is the ‘bright idea’ of creativity, or choreography, comes from the dream. This is difficult to accept by some people who claim it came from them and their thinking. Einstein was honest enough to admit that the bright idea came from his dreaming. For his special relativity theory he made endless calculations but the solution came in a dream ‘like a giant die making an indelible impress, a huge map of the universe outlined itself in one clear vision’ (Brian, 1996).

Dreaming has been intriguing to mankind for millennia. The Bible contains many dreams, and early Greek writers were fascinated by dreaming. The twentieth century saw dreaming made part of the therapeutic endeavour. Freud and his followers have defined dreaming for contemporary times. In psycho-analysis the preoccupation with dreaming is to find from the individual what her hidden conflicts are, what her innate character is. It is very ego-centric being only concerned with the individual. It involves a profound exploration of the past and dramatises the biography of the individual. Such an analytic, or therapeutic, exploration is bounded by the finite world.

The advantages of such an analysis are many, not to be traduced or spurned, and not to be gainsaid. However, dreaming can be done in another way. This method was discovered at the Tavistock Institute in 1982. It turned the individual dream method on its head. For a century, starting with Freud, dreaming has been construed as being about the individual. What would happen if dreaming was done with many simultaneously?

SOCIAL DREAMING
Social dreaming started from different assumptions. The principal was that the focus of social dreaming was to be on the dream and not the dreamer, which was left to individual analysis. Instead of the therapeutic dyad, a new ‘container’ had to be thought of to accommodate the many meeting simultaneously. This the founders called a ‘matrix’ to capture the idea that an exploration of dreaming and the undifferentiated unconscious could only be done in a matrix. The idea of ‘group’ was rejected because not only was dream to be the focus but also experience suggested that a group would become pre-occupied with ‘I’, the ego, and would focus on the group dynamics instead of the dream. A matrix discovers what only a matrix can discover. What has been discovered is that by changing the ‘container’ from the dyad to the matrix that the ‘contained’ of the dreaming changed, new contents of dreaming were being surfaced. The passage of time has shown the founders that a defence against the dream and the infinite is to mobilize the sure knowledge of group dynamics, which safely delivers the dream-participants on to the safe ground of what is finite.

By making dream the currency of the matrix, not the relationships among the participants’, a Faraday Cage was constructed, mentally, to keep other phenomena, like group dynamics, out. In time, this ‘invention’ of the new container was justified because it allowed much more profound exploration of unconscious phenomena, and did it in a safe, non-threatening way.

What happens in Social Dreaming? The participants convene in a Social Dreaming Matrix (SDM) for an hour, or an hour and a half. The time boundary is important. The participants are being asked to revel in dreaming and the unconscious for a limited time. They are being asked to submerge their ego to enter a state of ego-lessness in order that they can experience the dream in a completely fresh way without the encumbrance of previous knowledge. It is a bounded exploration within the time-frame,

After the purpose is stated by one of the convening hosts, dreams are asked for. A dream will be offered, another, and another. It may happen that someone will offer an association. Free association is to say what has crossed one’s mind as the dream was recounted. It is to let the mind go free, not to monitor what one wants to say. There are as many associations to a dream as there are members of the matrix. This pattern goes on till the matrix finishes. Occasionally, this will be broken as the host, or any participant discerns a pattern to the dreaming and offers a working hypothesis. There is no hierarchy in the matrix and participants report that they experienced a new kind of freedom and tolerance in the matrix.

The SDM is directed at exploring the knowledge, information, and insight, contained in the dream. It is, therefore, a cultural exploration, quite different from individual, therapeutic dreaming. The dream is the centre of the matrix, the context is social and so the SDM is socio-centric, and not ego-centric. The bias is looking to the future, and seeing life as an admixture of comedy and tragedy.

There are two achievements for the SDM. (i) Social dreaming inducts participants to the infinite by treating dream as a tool of cultural enquiry. That dreams arise from the unconscious of the individual is self-evident but the matrix makes the social unconscious evident. The matrix which is the web of unspoken feelings, emotions, thinking and thought that connects people. As individual unconscious minds resonate, or chime, in the matrix they imperceptibly become a social unconscious, and it is this which makes infinity realizable. This is made manifest through the unconscious scanning that is taking place all the time in the SDM.

(ii) The SDM introduces the dream-participants to the phenomenal experience of transforming thinking. The differences between consciousness and the unconscious have been referred to. It is the symmetrical logic of the unconscious that juxtaposes phenomena in novel ways, at times, bizarre and surreal. Through free association to dreams in the matrix the potential meanings of the dream are expanded. It is through this that the transformation of the thinking of the dream is initiated. Thus, new understanding and knowledge is made manifest.

Whereas a group is preoccupied with being a universe of meaning as ego-centric individuals struggle to define that universe, in a matrix it is different. A matrix learns to tolerate existence in a multi-verse of meanings and this leads to the infinite possibilities of dreaming in a matrix.

To further the thinking of the matrix a Dream Reflection Group is convened. This is a group, in contradistinction to the matrix. The purpose is to reflect on the pattern that connects the dreams. This means noting all the dreams with their themes and using amplification to enrich or enhance the dreams. Amplification is to situate the dream in its cultural context by referring to plays, novels, films, etc. that could enlarge the meaning of the dream. In the DRG the idea is to transform the thinking of the dream to ultimately formulate working hypotheses on what, e.g. the dreams are telling us about society, or the system we work in, or the state of contemporary society.

These two events – the SDM and the DRG – should be seen as working in tandem. The DRG was invented because it was found that the SDM could only partly fulfil the transformation of thinking. More time was needed because the emphasis in the SDM was on collecting dreams from the dream-participants, leaving limited time for transformation of thinking and formulating working hypotheses.

Although the SDM is fun, it shouldn’t be seen as an entertainment exclusively. It is designed for the serious work of establishing meanings to the dreams and using that, through transformation of thinking, to discover new knowledge. That is its creative thrust (Lawrence, 1998, 2003, 2005, 2007).

The Daghdha enterprise convenes a SDM, and much of what has been written will be familiar to its members. What became apparent to the writer was that there is an unconscious choreography of dreams in a matrix. He had never thought of this way of framing the dreaming before. He looks forward to testing this idea in future SDMs.

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published 21 February 08