On The Couch with the Freudian Dream Girls

Träume sind Schäume – dreams are froth...

My friend and I waited a little nervously in the dilapidated and musty waiting room within the shelled-out Treasury building for our session with the Freudian Dream Girls. There was a strange mixture of simplified Freudian concepts and aspirational ‘Life Coach’ quotations plastered around the room on laminated placards, which led to a confused sense of what approach the Dream Girls were going to take.

After a short wait, two beautiful and austere women attired in dark dresses, pearls and loosely upswept hair came to collect us. We were led into a performance space laid out with Persian rugs, cushions, a tea-set and an analyst’s chaise longue. The women both introduced themselves as Anna – each a part of the same ego and, my guess was, a representation of Anna Freud, one of the founders of psychoanalytic child psychology and youngest child of Sigmund.

I was immediately intrigued and On the Couch with the Freudian Dream Girls started with a lot of promise. The combination of the set, moody back-lighting and the imperious manner of the two performers induced an exciting and unsettling feeling akin to being trapped inside a Pirandello play or, perhaps, that the character(s) had stepped out of a Victorian Book of the Dead.

However, whilst Russya Connor and Jen Jamieson are trained therapists and performers, the work as a piece of performance art lacked cohesion, and yet neither was it an insightful therapeutic session: unfortunately, it was not completely satisfying as either one thing or the other.

My friend found the Dream Girls looming and intimidating. He likened this feeling to an analogous re-contextualisation of how the daunting figure of Sigmund Freud may have appeared to a vulnerable patient at the beginning of the 20th century. This was a deeper experience than I had, finding the performers’ improvisation skills somewhat unrefined and a brief moment of singing The Everly Brothers’ Dream merely incongruous.

Whilst the show offers space for up to two audience members at each sitting, the Dream Girls seemed a little unprepared for working with two people in our session. I must ponder here, as I was part of the interactive performance, how much I may have contributed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the piece? My friend and I were reticent to fill the space with our own talk or dream musings, more often than not looking to the Dream Girls to progress each moment. The Dream Girls took the approach of a therapist who has been working with a client after a year of intensive therapy, thus leaving a large amount of room for the “client” to insert themselves into the work. This led to a disjunction in relation to what each person in the room expected and received from the experience.

The concept of On the Couch with the Freudian Dream Girls would possibly achieve more within a broader program of small performance-art works. Having recently attended the Proximity Festival, I thought this show could benefit from inclusion in a similar framework, but as a standalone piece I found it a bit thin on the ground. Both Connor and Jamieson already have individual works included in the Proximity Festival program and there is a sense that this project was borne with Proximity in mind but it didn’t quite fit its parameters.

If your aim is genuinely to have a dream interpreted for you in an unusual context, then I encourage you to go. If you are looking for a more theatrical, performative element, you may not find exactly what you are looking for.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

On The Couch with the Freudian Dream Girls
Presented and performed by Russya Connor & Jen Jamieson

The Treasury Back Room
Corner St Georges Tce & Barrack St, Perth
Info and tickets: www.fringeworld.com.au