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TRAUME SIND BAUME
(DREAMS ARE TREES)
Dreams are like trees
their roots come out of the dark
and stretch up to the light

“I’m four years old, I’m sitting on my mother’s knee in a post-war train packed with people which stops in the middle of the tracks, and the light goes out. And in the complete darkness, I start singing aloud a popular song of that time, emanating despair and will to live: illusions...nothing but illusions, we mustn’t think, we have to act.”
For Hanna Schygulla everything began there, in the trains which crossed the ruins of Germany, when she fled from her native city in Silesia. The song has always made her dream, and “if we take our dreams seriously, if we water them well, without tormenting ourselves, they become reality.”
Artaud said that theatre must be a true precipice of dreams, and Schygulla enters a process of unconscious languages, of irrational materials which have been a ferment of her culture. Now it is her very dreams which have materialised in the form of seven short films, which the German artist has set in «Protocoles de rêves», allowing us to share the most real thing she possesses: intimacy. «There was a time when I would write down my dreams as soon as I awoke. But it took me nearly 25 years to reconstruct these mirages experienced under the influence of Fassbinder, to understand that these fragments of nocturnal ideas have influenced my whole life». And the opportunity for Hanna Schygulla to give a theatrical form to this disquieting and poetic material came in 2004, when the Moma in New York organised a retrospective of her and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to celebrate the 60th birthday of the German actress of Polish descent. And so «Protocoles de rêves» was born in the double sense of «ritual and register of notes, a work created - continues Schygulla - using several videos shot by me in 1979 – based on texts by R. W. Fassbinder, Jorge Luis Borges, Calderon de la Barca, Arthur Rimbaud, Heiner Müller, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Claude Carriè - , inspired by seven of my dreams, today assembled to form a theatrical creation which I enter and exit as if I were an extension of the themes of each dream». The videos, found in a trunk in her father’s house, were a kind of therapy following a professional disappointment due to a cancelled film with Fassbinder, for whom she was his muse and favourite actress for more than a decade. «We were supposed to make a film – she remembers – about the schizophrenic German artist Unica Zurn and her surreal visions. Fassbinder had asked me to contribute to the film, not only as an actress, but also as co-author and co-screenwriter. But then his partner committed suicide and he abandoned the project to shoot "A Year With Thirteen Moons"».

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