Out of mind

SCREEN SHOT Meyer keeps an eye on things.

Photo: Eileen Ryan

In a recent rehearsal for the Waking Room, a trio of men (choreographer Jonathan Meyer plus dancers Philip Elson and Michel Rodriguez), expressed a range of behaviors from ridiculous to disturbing. They shook, stared into space, postured grandly with a walking stick or cowered in a small ball on the floor. The work, premiering Thursday 10, is unnerving—almost in a literal sense: Inspired by studies of psychosis, Meyer tried to find ways of circumventing the normal nervous system pathways between stimulus and response.

Meyer, 37, grew up in Lombard, but his dance studies have taken him from Brazil to Amsterdam. Along the way, he began a program of study called Body-Mind Centering (developed over the last 35 years by dancer and occupational therapist Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, now based in California). Through BMC, Meyer entered into a course of inquiry exploring the dancer’s basic tool, the body-mind, in detail—through a combination of sometimes dance-like experiential exercises with an intellectual application of anatomy and physiology.

Waking Room was sparked about eight years ago, while Meyer was immersed in a BMC course. By chance he was also reading Recovering Sanity by the late Edward Podvoll, a book about the experience of psychosis and mental illness. “Part of what was exciting is that Podvoll was detailing in a minute way what happens in the mind during psychosis, the same way physiological processes are explored in detail in BMC.” Meyer found an “automatic link” between these two areas of study and began to wonder, “What happens physiologically in psychosis?”

This question turned out to have choreographic applications. When an opportunity came to apply for a grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum last year, Meyer proposed a work based on this question—and won funding. He used the grant proceeds to visit Windhorse, a treatment facility that Podvoll established in Boulder, Colorado. He also spent time volunteering at Thresholds, a local organization that helps people in recovery from psychosis.

Meyer’s inquiries yielded even more useful information when he turned his attention to his own body and mind. “The richest part of my research was in the studio, exploring my own perceptions.” Inspired by Podvoll’s descriptions of “micro-operations” in the brain, Meyer became engaged in trying to discover movement generated by the body before it is filtered through the conscious, “rational” mind. “It’s a lot of reflexive movement, arising out of reactions or responses before they are cognitively processed,” he says. “I suppose it looks twitchy and spastic, and it is emotionally loaded.”

Although Meyer never referred to Freud in our interview or any of his writings about his process, the costumes for the work, by Meyer’s frequent collaborator Iris Bainum-Houle, remind one of Freud’s famous title, Civilization and its Discontents. With bare feet and wearing dirty knee britches and tattered shirts with copious neck ruffles, the characters in Waking exemplify the kind of irrepressible energy of the mind out of kilter, bound in historic garments of social mores and proper behavior.

“The piece inhabits an odd world, outside of ordinary consciousness,” Meyer says. “I hope that it comes across as a dream with its own inherent logic. I’m not trying to offer a lesson of any kind, but I do feel there is a simultaneousness about the beauty and danger of getting into non-ordinary consciousness. There is so much potential, as well as fear and discomfort.”

The Waking Room arises Thursday 10–Sunday 13 and Wednesday 16–September 19.

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