Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

In the October issue of Fast Company, a monthly journal of business and innovation, there is an article by Gregory Berns called “Rewiring the Creative Mind.” In it, the author discusses what neuroscience has revealed about how to come up with new ideas. What scientists have discovered is that perception and imagination activate the same neural circuitry. The difference is that visual perception is modified by experience–we become efficient at processing visual information by repeated exposure. So–we see what we expect to see. Imagination is activated by “rewiring the mind”–providing “any circumstance in which the brain has a hard time predicting what will happen next.”

Kafka on the Shore is a superb example of an imagination-activator. The journey of the play does not conform to an expected narrative trajectory–the logic of the story is dream logic. It is an associative, subterranean logic. Haruki Murakami, the author of Kafka on the Shore, in describing his writing process cites the example of the Sheep Man in his novel A Wild Sheep Chase. He says:

I was not planning to bring such a character onstage: he just popped out while I was writing. This was something from the world of darkness, a being that lives in the other world. Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders (two characters in Kafka on the Shore) are the same kind of thing–”performers” who appear from the darkness. (…) I think the story would not have proceeded so successfully had those two icons not been present. I think, too, though, that there are a lot of people out there who can’t accept such things.

It is a startling revelation, this admission by the author that he is not entirely in control of the characters that appear in his story but that those characters, who appeared as if by their own volition, are necessary to the story. It is revealing, as well, that Murakami describes the appearance of these characters in performative terms–they are “performers” who appear “onstage.” They have their own agency on the stage of Murakami’s mind.

The action that Murakami describes is very much the action of our dreams. We sleep at night and a host of characters (ourselves, included), enter the stage of our mind unbidden and perform the most extraordinary actions–actions which, in our daylight consciousness, we would often disapprove. (How many times have you woken, remembering a dream, and been mortified by the actions you performed overnight?)

Kafka is like this. Strange, impossible things happen and yet, like the stage of our dreaming mind, the theater’s stage contains these images as necessary, as inevitable, as true.

The play invites us to open that circuit of our mind to unexpected outcomes, the play wants our imagination–that zone of consciousness that observes a new, unexpected world.

The best way to receive Kafka is with your dreaming consciousness. When we dream, we do not demand conformity to expected outcomes. We imagine–we accept the procedure of image as inevitable (even, while, like the appearance of Johnnie Walker, we cannot explain why this is so).

The wonder of the theatrical stage is how nearly it replicates the stage of the dreaming mind: characters enter and exit at will; it is a sensual, complex space–filled with multiple images that overlap, disappear into one another, have color and sound, and arrange themselves in a visual logic that defies linear narration. (We’ve all had the experience of trying to narrate back a particularly vivid dream and found ourselves unable to capture its simultaneity, its urgency, its insistence on an inevitability and logic that we know is true but cannot explain).

We welcome you to our season of the imagination with this profound and elusive story of a young boy’s coming of age. This is a story that requires (who knows why) the parallel story of an older man toward his own death. It is as if the subterranean, recursive movement toward death necessarily accompanies the young man’s movement out into the world. Why? Because our life is lived both in the daylight world and in the darkness of our dreams. This beautiful complementarity of psyche has great purchase on the stage: we sit in the darkness and watch our other. We do not know the outcome and so, perception becomes imagination.

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Kafka on the Shore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.