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Song Lines
Original Post
Imagine finding your way across the Australian Outback with a song as your only guide. As if the notes were tracks to follow left by an animal that created all the landforms you pass through. Long ago in Dreamtime, animal ancestors created the world: they left sink holes where they made love, caves where they slept, cliffs where they fought, each animal a song, telling their story in connection with the land. An aborigine learns his animal’s song and walks in their tracks, unraveling the story of his animal in the land as he witnesses the landforms the animal created. Singing and walking s/he keeps the animal alive under the earth still dreaming up the land, and the land healthy too. The Song Line is both song and track in the land, with it the aborigine is never lost.

Bruce Chatwin describes these practices in The Songlines, a book about his travels in the Australian Outback, and what it means to be nomadic. The more one reads, the aborigine cosmogony is so deep that it is ever slips out of one’s grasp. But something in the idea of Dreamtime, the practice of walking in the land to keep it alive is familiar. When I am out trekking in the mountains, I feel the land animate as a creative force; my task is to travel and observe, sing its praises. Watch the moon reflect in a tarn, and you cannot help but wonder at the Dreamer. Dreamtime the last song in the play is the closest I come to expressing these ideas, and bringing the arc of the play full circle.

A platypus is dreaming up the world, but doesn’t know he dreams. Captured by a scientist who is studying REM sleep, the platypus suddenly becomes aware of the notion of dreaming and wants desperately to see his dreams in order to escape from the tank. Platypus meets scientists daughter, Prozak, who is also in quest of her dreams about her dead mother; through her music, ritual, and descent into a coma, the platypus enters a dream to wake her up. My favorite moment is at the end of the play, when she sings "Dreamtime," dedicating it to her friend Frankie, the platypus, and he appears in the audience with his epiphany, nudging his fellow audience members: "Hey, I’m dreaming… I’m dreaming. This is my dream!"

Comment from KellyAnne Hanrahan on 4/21/2009

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