Presented by the UBC School of Music, Theatre at UBC, and the Chan Centre
UBC Opera Ensemble
UBC Symphony Orchestra
David Agler, Conductor
Nancy Hermiston, Director
Guests artists: Judith Forst, John Avey, Roelof Oostwoud
The Dream Healer is based on Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim. Focused on Carl Jung at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich, it is a story about disintegration of the psyche.
Early in the opera, Pilgrim’s friend, Lady Sybil, asks Jung about disintegration as a symptom of schizophrenia and whether reintegration of the fragments is possible.
Replies Jung, “Sometimes we have to accept that things break into pieces.”
“And then?” she asks.
“‘And then'” becomes a journey to integrate the real with the unreal, the supposed with the unimaginable, so that new understandings of the human condition are possible.
Carl Jung sought a healing bridge between the known and the unknown worlds of the human mind. This is not just a work of biography, but also about social issues relating to total health – a concept that Jung so amazingly pioneered by broadening our understanding of healing to include not only science but also the humanities and the arts.
