Waltzing with Strindberg: Exploring Practices of Memory in A Dream Play

The aim of this article is to explore embodied practices of memory in Strindberg’s drama A Dream Play from a dance perspective. It is demonstrated that a profound exploration of this hitherto underexplored perspective can provide a fuller and more critically productive understanding of the drama. Even if in recent years international Strindberg studies has moved away from narrowly text-oriented and biographical approaches to his work, and toward multimedia, visual and multisensory aspects of it, dance and choreography are still rare topics within the field. In the article we first look at how Strindberg employed dance in the dramatic text for A Dream Play, and then expand on his dance contexts. Thirdly, we turn to a TV version of A Dream Play from 1980 to explore in particular how the waltz, an immensely popular dance form in Strindberg’s time, evokes and embodies cultural memories in the production. What is presented in the article draws on and further expands our work within the project «Dream-playing across borders: accessing the non-texts of Strindberg’s A Dream Play in Düsseldorf, 1915–18 and beyond», at the University of Gothenburg.