As Kramer is from the first generation of her family not to attend residential schools, her body of work reads as a journey of healing from intergenerational trauma and colonial hurt. Still, there is something hopeful about her performances; she creates openings that invite daydreaming, stillness, introspection, and restfulness. She masterfully uses her body as a vector through which nonverbal language can flow between her and the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Lara-Kramer_EatingbonesandLickingbread\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Dube_Lara-Kramer_EatingbonesandLickingbread_DancemakersToronto_Omer-Yukseker_2020-3-scaled.jpg\")
Eating bones and Licking bread<\/em>, performance view, Dancemakers, Toronto, 2020.
Photo: Omer Yukseker, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Dreams have long been theorized by psychoanalysts, and more recently by decolonial scholars like Kimberly L. Todd, as digestive devices that help people process otherwise repressed fears, trauma, emotions, and feelings.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Kimberly L. Todd, \u201cShedding of the Colonial Skin: The Decolonial Potentialities of Dreaming,\u201d in Decolonizing the Spirit in Education and Beyond: Resistance and Solidarity<\/em>, ed. N. N. Wane, M. S. Todorova, and K. L. Todd (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 157.<\/span> In Todd\u2019s view, dreaming can help us heal our otherwise fragmented selves, mending the deep-rooted and internalized Cartesian split.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To take dreams seriously is to embrace their ability to assist us in digesting events that our waking mind cannot because they are too painful, traumatic, or repressed. In that context, recurring dreams\u2014and especially recurring nightmares\u2014can be understood as \u201cundreamt\u201d or \u201cundreamable\u201d dreams, which obstinately resist digestion. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The psychoanalyst Thomas H. Ogden suggests that troubled dreamers, having reached their emotional limit for dreaming, require \u201cthe mind of another person\u2014\u2018one acquainted with the night\u2019\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Thomas H. Ogden, \u201cThis Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries,\u201d International Journal of Psychoanalysis<\/em> 85, no. 4 (2004): 861.<\/span> to help them dream the undreamable aspect of their nightmare. That which belongs neither to the troubled dreamer nor the helper is referred to as a \u201cthird subject\u201d or a \u201cthird Other\u201d that gives a way out of recurring dreams\u2019 vicious cycle.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ogden, \u201cThis Art of Psychoanalysis,\u201d 856.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Following a similar logic, the Wolastoqiyik artist and choreographer Ivanie Aubin-Malo sees dance as society\u2019s digestive system, as it carves out a temporary space where both interpreter and audience members can collectively process feelings and \u201crest them into the earth.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ivanie Aubin-Malo and James Oscar, \u201cIn Search of the \u2018Coming Community\u2019: A Conversation Between Curators Ivanie Aubin-Malo and James Oscar,\u201d accessible online. The conversation took place surrounding the performance of Kramer\u2019s Them Voices<\/em> at the Festival TransAmeriques, Montr\u00e9al, May 27\u201329, 2021.<\/span> Dance articulates what cannot be otherwise voiced; in this sense, its potentiality is akin to that of the unconscious. When performer and audience come together in the ephemeral dance space, a \u201cthird Other\u201d is created that belongs to neither the performer nor the audience. This tertiary space invites us to collectively dream, heal, hope, and, most importantly, begin mending colonial-born divides. The meditative quality of Eating bones and Licking bread<\/em> and the increased audience attentiveness it calls for allow for the public and the performer to come together, listen, reflect, and speculate through nonverbal communion. Unlike Ogden\u2019s psychoanalytical approach to undreamt dreams as a matter of clinical foreclosing, Kramer\u2019s engagement with undreamable dreams centres on futural foreclosing. For Kramer, dreaming undreamt dreams is a commitment to exploring otherwise inaccessible potentialities that are not yet in the realm of possibility by stretching beyond what is even imaginable. It is conceiving the inconceivable and being radically open to the unknown, collectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By carving out space for slow-paced collective digestion, Kramer offers a counterweight to colonialism\u2019s impetus to consume, to devour, what is Other. The art critic and anthropologist-researcher\u2014and Kramer\u2019s close collaborator\u2014James Oscar reads her character as constantly wayfaring, seeking \u201crituals to call into question these ceaseless cycles to give us the room to again dream of the benefits of a world of reciprocity, mutuality.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Oscar, \u201cLove in the Time of Cholera,\u201d 2.<\/span> Dreams translated into performances become collective rituals that challenge consumption dynamics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inviting viewers to meditate\u2014reaching a state that is akin to what Kramer refers to as the \u201cambiguity of dreaming\u201d\u2014Eating bones and Licking bread<\/em> unfolds with nearly imperceptible slowness. Kramer, wearing only an oversized white t-shirt, crouches on the ground. With a pair of tweezers, she painstakingly positions manoomin grains side by side atop a white tarp. The audience is closely gathered around her, and everybody\u2019s attention is intently directed toward her minute actions for the better part of an hour. The performance is repetitive, solemn, and subdued. In a more recent version of the work, the rice appears only at the beginning. Various construction materials populate the stage\u2014rolls of bright-pink Styrofoam, a long transparent plastic tube\u2014and are uncovered as the performance unfolds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Them Voices<\/em> (2021)\u2014a powerful 70-minute solo performance\u2014picks up right where Eating bones and Licking bread leaves off. A long white tarp traverses the stage and camouflages yet-to-be-discovered elements; a couple of neon lights lie on the ground. Centre stage stands a platform. At first glance, the pared-down scenography is reminiscent of a makeshift post-apocalyptic camp: something daunting has happened, tragedy has struck, and these are the remains. Walking backwards, hiding her face under messy hair, Kramer enters. As she toys with a trowel, runs around the stage in unzipped high-heeled boots, sleeps on the platform, or eviscerates a bag of soil, the performance oscillates between moments of complete temporal deceleration\u2014an expression coined by the performance studies scholar Lilian Mengesha7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Lilian Mengesha, \u201cDeceleration as Decolonial Intervention in Lara Kramer\u2019s NGS: Native Girl Syndrome<\/em>,\u201d ASAP\/Journal<\/em> 4, no. 3 (2019): 577.<\/span>\u2014in which time seems to stand still, and moments of frantic actions and pure mania. Accompanied by a minimalist soundtrack of passing cars, the audience and Kramer enter an eerie dreamscape, replete with tensions and contradictions. Here, the call to dreaming is intergenerational. How can past knowledge and histories and future voices and ancestors meet in Kramer\u2019s body and in the time-space of the dance performance? Opening up otherwise foreclosed temporalities, Kramer\u2019s undreamt dream invokes what the Australian scholar anique vered and the Gumbaynggirr and Fijian-Australian scholar Grace Gibson call \u201cdecolonial dreaming\u201d\u2014that is, \u201ca shared and active history-telling, one in which we all have a place and indeed a responsibility.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - anique vered and Grace Gibson, \u201cA Decolonial Dreaming,\u201d in Histories, Myths and Decolonial Interventions: A Planetary Resistance<\/em>, eds. Arti Nirmal and Sayan Dey (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 146.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In a pivotal moment of Them Voices<\/em>, Kramer suddenly tears open a bag of soil. She is not precious about it: she plunges into the soil, bathing herself in it. Enfolded in this visceral gesture are many histories that recall deep love and belonging to ancestral territories, but also a legacy of intergenerational hurt that has been absorbed by the soil. In a conversation that I had with Kramer, she remembered a strange feeling as she was leaving her grandmother\u2019s territory at Lac Seul, at once hurting and belonging. Like soil wrapped in plastic bags\u2014an act of commodification\u2014Indigenous communities have long been commodified, engaged with in a purely transactional manner, digested, as it were, by colonial regimes. Although it is the site of polarizing tensions, Earth is also rich in decolonial potential. Todd argues that dreams can (re)ignite our sense of groundedness, of belonging to land.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Todd, \u201cShedding of the Colonial Skin,\u201d 169.<\/span> Embedded in that connectedness is a sense of both individual and collective responsibility to formulate a response to Earth\u2019s calling us through dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both dance and dreams can help us cultivate better relations with Earth and formulate potent responses to it, but they are also vectors of disruption of hegemonic colonial timescapes. The cyclical aspect of recurring dreams and the ambiguity of dreaming offered by Eating bones and Licking bread<\/em>,coupled with the deceleration of Them Voices<\/em>,contribute to blurring the strict linearity and sequentiality of colonial time, which the literary scholar Amanda Lagji defines as \u201ccolonial discourse\u2019s production of an ostensibly homogenizing and universalizing temporality, indebted to the Enlightenment, that underpinned European colonial expansion during high imperialism and remains influential for imperial ideologies of control.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Amanda Lagji, Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time: Waiting for Now<\/em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 14.<\/span> Cyclical, ambiguous, and decelerated temporalities all push back against this ideal of a singular, progressive time that never folds back on itself. But in times of reckoning with colonial injustices and legacies of trauma, there is a need for less harmful understandings of time. Eating bones and Licking bread <\/em>and Them Voices<\/em> participate in this effort by foregrounding Anishinaabeg temporality, characterized by its cyclicality, including its intimate connections to seasonal food availability (for example, there is a manoomin month).11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Seven Generations Education Institute, \u201cHow to Harvest and Prepare Wild Rice (Manoomin),\u201d posted October 31, 2023, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas for Todd dreams can open up new worlds, the dance and politics scholar Dana Mills argues that dancers, too, hold the power to release new, unimaginable worlds.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Dana Mills, \u201cConclusions: The Dancer of the Future Dancing Radical Hope,\u201d in Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries<\/em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 122.<\/span> When dance and the exploration of undreamt dreams overlap, this power to open and release new worlds is heightened. Those worlds are neither the dancers\u2019 nor the audiences\u2019. Rather, they belong to those \u201cthird Others\u201d collectively created in the dance space, which is at once dream and futurity in the making. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Currently pursuing a PhD inhumanities at Concordia University, Jo\u00eblle Dub\u00e9 is researching the intersectional temporalities of intergenerational (in)justices and contemporary art. Positing relationality at the centre of her theoretical preoccupations, she investigates ways of rearticulating the relationship between the living and life-to-come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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![\"Lara-Kramer_ThemVoices\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Dube_Lara-Kramer_ThemVoices_MACFTA_2021-scaled.jpg\")
Them Voices<\/em>, performance view, Festival TransAm\u00e9riques, Mus\u00e9e d’art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al, 2021.
Photo: Charles Lafrance, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lara-Kramer_ThemVoices\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Dube_Lara-Kramer_ThemVoices_EspaceLibreFTA_2022_03-C-scaled.jpg\")
Them Voices<\/em>, performance view, Festival TransAm\u00e9riques, Espace Libre, Montr\u00e9al, 2022.
Photo: Alex C\u00f4t\u00e9, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Lara-Kramer_ThemVoices\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/112_DO_Dube_Lara-Kramer_ThemVoices_EspaceLibreFTA_2022_05-scaled.jpg\")
Them Voices<\/em>, performance view, Festival TransAm\u00e9riques, Espace Libre, Montr\u00e9al, 2022.
Photo: Alex C\u00f4t\u00e9, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n