Critically-acclaimed dance performance The Past in Colombo

Friday, 13 February 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The journey of The Past began when Constanza Macras went to the city of Dresden and talked to eyewitnesses who can remember a city that no longer exists in the same form today, and recount the Dresden bombing of 1945. It is rooted in a city and its histories, in a landscape of war and what comes after, in a situation of survival and change, in remembrance and forgetting. This is a performance that really explores (and explodes) the art of memory or ‘ars memoriae’: memories that are particularly strongly associated with physical locations, rooms and architecture. The starting point is the city as a concrete geographical location, as an anchor for memory, a mental picture and a cast of mind. What happens with our memories, what happens to those who still remember when these physical places are destroyed?

The Past is a collaborative work made with Swiss/Italian composer Oscar Bianchi, who composed a music score that delves into collective and individual memory. Exploring spaces between written and oral practice, the music embodies both the depth and the contradictions that rites of passage, communication and memory entail in the sphere of sound, and celebrate sound as a physical, sometimes muscular, place where emotional and existential realities find in memory an independent and sometimes rule-less form of storage. The Past explores the architectural sense of place as narrative instruments of our history – in the rewriting of history, for overcoming the wounds of the past, and for understanding contemporary events (personal and global) as part of a constant cycle that we experience as the passing of time. The past has been called ‘a reminder of what performing arts is capable of on stage: creating an autonomous place of cultural memory’ (süddeutsche zeitung|11.11.2014); it is considered a performance tour-de-force – ‘a hybrid form between concert, dance theatre and history lesson, a stimulating paradigm for the interdisciplinary interests of contemporary dance’ (berliner morgenpost|30.11.14). The Past is a production by Constanza Macras | Dorkypark and Hellerau – europäisches zentrum der künste in co-production with Schaubühne Berlin. Funded in the frame of doppelpass-program of Kulturstiftung des Bundes and funded by Schweizer Kulturstiftung pro Helvetia.

The Past will tour the South Asian region with performances in Bangalore (at the attakkalari biennale) and in Chennai, before they arrive to share with Colombo audiences a rare one night of magic in dance and music. The Past will be performed in Colombo on Sunday 15 February from 7 p.m. at the Musaeus College Auditorium, 35, Barnes Place, Colombo 7. Tickets for the performance will be available at the Goethe-Institut, Colombo. For more information about the performance, company and direct contact with the company please contact Ruhanie Perera on [email protected] or 0773020269/0777375850.