Work in Progress
THIS LIKE A DREAM KEEPS OTHER TIME
Nene Humphrey in Collaboration with Matana Roberts:
Musical compositions, improvisations, performative programming.
This Like a Dream Keeps Other Time is a work in progress exploring a powerful dream about love and grief in which I learn to sing.
The project is conceived as a visual and sound installation with performative programming.
This Like a Dream Keeps Other Time explores loss, the neurology of emotion and the beauty inherent in these states. It uses neuroscientific and psychological research about the power of dreaming and emotions to explore the sense of belonging and mood elevation that surface with communal singing. I am collaborating with composer/saxophonist Matana Roberts on music and vocal elements in the project.
Project Inspiration:
What makes dreams involving music radically different from other dreams?
Scientists wonder why musical dreams are immune to the distortions and the disguises which are characteristic of almost all other elements in dreams. Neurological evidence suggests that musical dreams may have a special cerebral organization of their own.
Research by psychologists and neuroscientists demonstrates that group singing has been an essential human trait for tens of thousands of years and that feelings of belonging and mood elevation are biologically ingrained to surface with communal singing.
Deeper research into these questions about dreaming, music and the brain were prompted by a powerful dream of my own.
In my dream choir ladies from my husbands' family church in rural Georgia are having a memorial celebration for him. They want to teach me to sing with them–but I've never sung before.
Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best...dark purples, scarlet reds pale yellows, creamy whites.
They sing acapella and then call and response and they’re fanning themselves with paper fans printed with images of Jesus. These ladies want me to come closer to sing with them. I join in and sing out with a voice I didn’t know I possessed!
Project Description:
This Like a Dream Keeps Other Time explores this dream and related neuroscientific and psychological research as an installation with sound and video components.
The project redreams my dream by weaving traditional singing styles of the American South (lined-out hymnody and call and response spirituals) with contemporary saxophone improvisations, the dream retold as poem, deep sleep EEG recordings, MRI animations, drawings, and sculptural objects. Composer/musician Matana Roberts is collaborating on unique recorded compositions, improvisations, and performative programming.
I will also be working closely with scientists at the LeDoux Neuroscience Lab as part of my on-going artist residency at their NYU facility.
The installation is divided into two spaces.
Space 1:
Materials in this space are arranged on 3 laboratory style tables and act as springboards for active, investigative looking. I want the viewer to discover their own connections to the brain, dreams, and music by engaging with visual and sonic materials specific to these themes. For example, at one table a mounted magnifying lens sits next to a small, boxed projection of the amygdala filmed through a high-powered microscope. Ordinarily invisible to the naked eye these ghostly images are extreme closeups of one of the most influential dream areas in our brains. The amygdala is also highly engaged in all forms of music making. The proximity of the magnifying lens to the video projection encourages the viewer to come closer, bend over and peer through the lens, bringing them into intimate contact both physically and psychologically to the magnified projection. As the camera searches through multiple microscope lenses a sense of both cosmic and micro space emerges at different moments.
I want this table to evoke a place of scientific inquiry as well as an atmosphere of reverie for the viewer, allowing their own dream memories to surface.
Space 2:
The second space is accessed from either side of the felt curtain, which acts as both a sound baffle and tactile 'wall’ The felt creates a more dimly lit, intimate place for sitting, and listening–a place where people may be moved to hum or sing along to Matana Robert's haunting vocal and instrumental work alluding to loss and healing. The music is recorded stereophonically in a call and response motif and played from speakers on opposite walls. The back waIl is filled with scroll drawings mirroring thematic imagery from space 1. Three rectangular fan structures sway overhead creating a gentle breeze. The fans echo both the function and colors of the church fans in the dream. The circular seating area in the middle of the space is intended to encourage a more communal atmosphere where people can listen together and become absorbed into the sonic atmosphere of Roberts’s composition. Because research demonstrates that feelings of belonging and mood elevation are biologically ingrained to surface with communal singing, my hope is that this space provides the opportunity for people to feel free to hum or sing along to some of the simple repetitive melodies in Robert's work.
Performative programming is built into the project.
Programming will include a strong community presence. Programmatic examples can include: periodic evenings with local choirs leading communal singing events; local musicians using installation elements as inspiration for creating unique compositions; Dream workshops exploring both the narrative and biologically aspects of our dreaming minds. Roberts and Humphrey will be available for additional improvisational performances created to activate and focus in on various elements in the installation
This collaboration brings together two women, one white, one black, from different generations, religious and geographical backgrounds, artistic disciplines and working practices. Throughout the collaborative process, Matana Roberts and Nene Humphrey worked to embrace these differences, while finding common ground in their mutual interests in exploratory research, neuroscience, singing in community, and dream journaling. Through audience activation and programming this project is intended to inspire similar types of coming together, uniting perspectives from different communities around a shared communal experience.