Exploring the art of memory

• The Past by Constanza Macras, presented by the Goethe Institut

Presented by the Goethe Institut of Colombo, The Past by Constanza Macras was staged at the Musaeus College Auditorium recently. The journey of the past begins 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. Therefore, the past 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 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. Funded by Schweizer Kulturstiftung Pro Helvetia. Pix by Upul Abayasekara