ABSTRACT
As I pointed out earlier, memory is embedded in our very act of seeing and movement seems to be a particularly potent force in unlocking memory’s vivid detail. Trisha Brown has an exercise where she asks students to remember the layout of their grandmother’s house and then create a movement path within that house of memory. Doing the exercise I found my movement infused with new interest, new meaning, as I sidled around the large bed where my grandparents slept, crawled on my belly under the dining room
Brown has commented:
Sometimes my dancing is metaphoric, using memory as a resource. Yet what may have been traumatic in, say 1941 makes hardly a ripple today when it is put through the mind and out the body. Still, memory gives a phrase a reality for me and modulates its quality and texture…. However, the image, the memory, must occur in performance at precisely the same moment as the act ion derived from it. Without thinking, there are just physical feats…3
Memory is an activation of the mind’s eye. In the Memory Theatres of classical times, we stroll through rooms of the imagination, coming upon the objects of value we had deliberately placed there. Our memories are sometimes as vivid as the images of our dreams, sometimes more so. I can still feel the fog of night walks in Edinburgh, see my grandfather carried out the door on a stretcher, breathe the dust of a road in the Cretan hills, and remember the sighting of whales from cliffs in Cornwall and Oregon. Sometimes, as French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar writes,
These fragments of real fact have the magical intensity of vision glimpsed in my dreams, and on the other hand, certain visions from my dreams have all the weight of lived events… Only my reason prevents me from mixing up the two orders of phenomena, but this same reason counsels me to perhaps reconcile them, to put them all together on a plane which is certainly one of unique reality.4
