Le travail du rêve (The Work of Dreams) is the fourth autonomous preliminary work for Le cri du Choucas, a long work in progress about Franz Kafka’s world, works, and character.

In psychoanalytical terms, the work of dreams describes the development process of the images populating our sleep and their tricks: associations, distortions, displacements, condensations…, a dreamworld syntax that shares commonalities with Kafka’s style: “My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background […]” (Diaries 1910-1923: August 6, 1914, Kafka). Here, my music writing draws inspiration from the unexpected figures, associations, and metamorphoses of these rhetorics, hiding under illusory incoherence the disguised discourse of the being’s depths.

— Francis Dhomont [English translation: François Couture, vi-09]

Le travail du rêve was realized in 2009 at the composer’s studio in Avignon (France) and premiered on July 30, 2009 during the 25th Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon at the Salle Pasteur of Le Corum in Montpellier (France). A new (2010) version was premiered on July 30, 2010 during the Inventionen 2010 festival at the St Elisabeth-Kirche in Berlin (Germany). It was commissioned by the Ina-GRM.

Premiere

• July 30, 2009, Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon: Rendez-vous de 18h, Salle Pasteur — Le Corum, Montpellier (Hérault, France)
• July 30, 2010, Premiere of the 2010 version: Inventionen 2010: BEASTory 3, St Elisabeth-Kirche, Berlin (Germany)
• January 22, 2011, Premiere of the final version: Multiphonies 2010-11: Akousma, Auditorium Saint-Germain — MPAA, Paris (France)