HELENA WALDMANN
FORGET IT!
At the place where we had to cram knowledge, the chalkboard would be wiped again an again: at school. In antiquity, memory was imagined as a wax tablet, and Jesus wrote his words in the sand. Forgetting is directly linked to learning: it means overwriting old knowledge. But the fire at the Anna Amalia library in Weimar or the collapse of the Cologne City Archive fuel the dream of a global digital library. The most immaterial of goods – digital memory, and its promise of ubiquitous availability – is supposed to counteract the loss of cultural memory. Forgetting threatens memory to the point that the UNESCO has now included immaterial cultural goods in its world heritage list. At the same time, there are 1.2 million dementia patients in Germany. Forgetting as a clinical picture brings to mind the virtues of remembering.
But what is wrong with forgetting? Probably that there is no deliberate forgetting. The smallest blips of everyday life – the mislaid umbrella, a name on the tip of the tongue – give an insight into the complex process of the failure of memory and recollection. But conversely, the need to forget can also be seen as the desire to learn. That is why I would like to show the art of forgetting, ars oblivionalis, in the oldest edifice of remembrance, the theatre.
By means of ballet and its sophisticated art of memorizing I would like to endeavour a trip around the brain of a dementia patient, my father. The oblivion of dance meets a stage that represents a projected brain. The spectators look into a mind where all movement is constantly controlled, compacted and intensified towards a right step, a step that makes all other steps appear utopian. “Forget it!” is not an invitation to forget – colloquially, it means that other steps are out of the question. Instead of a multitude of options, ballet overwrites every other movement with the objective of conserving a step through repetition.
The brain is built on a reward system, the so-called happiness hormones. The more familiar a step, the more impossible the others become, until they are forgotten. We call this very phenomenon the conservation of traditions. The stage narrows due to the increasing straightforwardness of repetition. Initially the steps find their way obscurely, the gaze of the spectators is searching and guided by a radio play. Then the stage is luminous with such rich yellow that the bodies’ outlines are softened and seem to disappear. The body separates from the self, the physical symptoms of dementia come to the fore. The disappearance of the body results from the totalization of memory, as immaterial as a film that repeats only what the body itself has already forgotten.
premiere planned for end of October 2010
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