{"id":807,"date":"2014-03-12T16:09:52","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T16:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=807"},"modified":"2014-04-03T23:26:37","modified_gmt":"2014-04-03T22:26:37","slug":"speak-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2014\/03\/speak-memory.html","title":{"rendered":"Speak, memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Not<\/a><\/p>\n

How do you imagine your memory? As a rheumatic showgirl going through her old paces; a disembodied mouth yabbering its hoard; a frolicsome performance troupe or a whirring tape machine, speaking into the void?<\/p>\n

Memory is the story the mind tells itself about itself, the unreliable biography that is all we\u2019ve got. We build it up and then it starts to fall through our fingers. But how do you put it onstage? Pinter\u2019s play Betrayal<\/em> backtracks through disappointed desire, traces the unravelling of marriage and friendship. Sondheim\u2019s Merrily We Roll Along<\/em> <\/a>moves along similar lines, while his Follies<\/em><\/a> confronts retired chorines with phantoms of their bright-plumed, bright-eyed, shiny-hope young selves. But these aren\u2019t so much memory dramas as plays about the past \u2013 its lost promise, its poor returns. How did we get to be here, as the disappointmonauts of Merrily<\/em> sing?<\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t experience memory as neatly staged scenes or crafted movie flashbacks. It\u2019s more of a mess. Treasure and detritus tumbled together \u2013 and both equally available for recall. There are false beginnings, unmoored endings, untethered images and sounds. Shards, fragments, loose threads flapping.<\/p>\n

It has been a good year for memory on stage. Central to Pina Bauch\u2019s 1980<\/em> \u2013 which I have written about here<\/a> before and almost certainly will again \u2013 are ensemble scenes in which, in a daft and profound way, everything happens at once. A man with a tureen tucked beneath his arm, each pappy spoonful reminding him of lost family, wanders through people at quixotic play. Some are singing, others chase and squeal. Women in evening dress behave like toddlers. The grown ups fight or flirt or flail around. Some just sit on the grass and listen to a creaky old harmonium. The man skirts them, bemused, lifting the occasional spoon to his mouth.<\/p>\n

Memory can feel like this. Messy, sad and mirthful all at once, setting the person you are loose among all the people you were and what they saw and what they made of it. Bausch achieves a lovely layering of unconnected sounds and images, vivid yet inconsequential \u2013 just the way memory reaches into the mind, at once junk shop and museum.<\/p>\n

Beckett\u2019s memory gabblers, sharply voiced and fleetingly embodied by Lisa Dwan <\/a>(pictured top by Alastair Muir<\/em>) in a recent programme, provide other images for the process. The sprinting mouth of Not I<\/em>, lips working furiously in a tight spotlight, has no time to inflect, select or linger \u2013 it\u2019s a galloping stream of recall. The old dame in Rockaby,<\/em> tilting back and forth in her chair; the fretful pacer in Footfalls<\/em> both suggest unbidden, unwelcome, inescapable memory.<\/p>\n

\"Daniel<\/a>

Daniel Kitson in Analog.ue Photo: Pavel Antonov<\/p><\/div>\n

And earlier this week I saw the solo performer Daniel Kitson tell tales about remembering in Analog.Ue<\/em> <\/a>at the National Theatre. He\u2019s present throughout but doesn\u2019t speak except on 46 endearingly archaic tape machines, reel to reels, clunky bedroom recorders. What better image for the retrieval of memory than a defunct technology, waiting to share its secrets if only we can be bothered to drag it from the loft and work out how to spark it up?<\/p>\n

Kitson\u2019s cantankerous melancholy frames a three-stranded story: about an old man spending a day recording his memories, the unhappy woman who listens to part of them 30 years later, and Kitson himself, an unhappy 36-year-old trying to create a new show, one of his displays of ‘oddly public solitude.’ The stories are often funny, but ultimately skew sad. Kitson spends the show spodding around with machines stacked at the back of the vast stage, bringing them forward and plugging them into a central spaghetti cluster of wires so that the relay can continue. His voiceover warns us that they could malfunction: increasingly, when he knelt to shine his torch at a recalcitrant machine, I\u2019d feel slightly panicky about a breakdown that might stop the show.<\/p>\n

It was just as well that the talk never halted for long, so that we weren\u2019t left alone with our own sense of upset. We start off scrabbling to accrue memories and end up worrying as they slip into the dark. Kitson\u2019s lonely people \u2013 he speaks like one of us \u2013 worry that all the photos and artefacts and knick-knacks they\u2019ve accumulated aren\u2019t enough. They can\u2019t serve as a bulwark against time, because nothing can.<\/p>\n

When Shakespeare describes \u2018cormorant devouring time\u2019, a heedless future gulping down the present, he means collective memory, not individual. But that idea of time gradually nibbling at our horde is piercing. If my memories go, what remains? What am I? Will I remember?<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you imagine your memory? As a rheumatic showgirl going through her old paces; a disembodied mouth yabbering its hoard; a frolicsome performance troupe or a whirring tape machine, speaking into the void? Memory is the story the mind tells itself about itself, the unreliable biography that is all we\u2019ve got. We build it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,47,42,46,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-dance","9":"tag-memory","10":"tag-pina-bausch","11":"tag-sondheim","12":"tag-theatre","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}