Memories Are Made of This...

Memories Are Made of This... by BADco. (Croatia) is a kind of kaleidoscopic derive through the fragmented textual tissue of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story The crack-up in which components of films dealing with memories, traces of dance materials and its spatial structures, and distorted real-time video material. All of it is put together so as to create a complex network of performance elements combined in such a way to allow ambiguous readings, interpretational short-circuits and crack-ups in one’s ability to deduce a coherent linear whole out of things presented. It can be compared to a notebook representing keywords from past events and souvenirs from earlier times. The notebook lies open and ready for new possible interpretations.

BADco. writes the following about Memories Are Made of This:

"Memories Are Made of This... performance notes is a project which, metaphorically speaking, travels within a complex topology of memory. It borrows the name of a popular Dean Martin song for a particular reason, in the words of the American cultural critic Steven Shaviro; "of all the crooners of the Fifties, none has vanished so utterly and so precipitously as Dean Martin. The man who cynically crooned Memories Are Made of This..., his biographer writes, hated memory itself. Dean Martin instinctively sought out that primordial oblivion that exceeds and ruins all remembering. Underneath the feeling in his voice, underneath the weaving of those colours, there was always Iontananza, the immemorial distance of a past that never has been present, and never can be made present."

(The quote is from Steven Shaviro’s book Doom Patrols)

To approach the topic of memory via a process intrinsic to it – forgetting – suggests two possibilities of entering this complex subject matter: to think in terms of vacuity, blankness, deletion, and further on, mental fissures and emotional crack-ups, and on the other hand, to treat the fact that we are able to forget, and that we do forget whether we choose to or not, as a faculty which opens upon numerous possibilities of creating, re-building the present from whatever leftovers of the past we can muster up at any moment and which enables us to endlessly traverse the bifurcations of Borgesian labyrinths as an attitude towards the present. The point is to keep the door which leads to a world of possibilities open. Because of that our methodology of work as well as the representative mode in which the project operates can be described as a notebook, a collection of performance notes and/or notes for a performance. A note is a reminder, a souvenir of some past situation, without an exposition yet open to all possible re-interpretations and fictionalizations, a marker of the possibility of a perpetual divergence.

The referential field of the Memories Are Made of This... performance notes is rather extensive; from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s texts The Crack-Up (a fictional rendering of the history of the author’s nervous breakdown, of emotional bankruptcy, of emptiness and despair while at the same time an attempt at recuperation through production, invention and creation), My Lost City (a kind of derive through author’s memory of his life in New York City), and excerpts from Fitzgerald’s The Notebooks, through movies Solaris (by Andrej Tarkowsky) and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (by Michel Gondry) which, each in its own specific way, deal with the ways how what we remember (and forget, or try to forget) can play tricky games on us, all the way to the figure of Dean Martin, the post-modern comic book Doom Patrol (by Grant Morrison) and at last, de-constructivist architecture (Bernard Tschumi’s theoretical rendering of Parc la Villette in Paris as a platform for creating dance materials).

Keeping all of this in mind we also wished to retain the complexity of our research as well as its mazelike nature in the final representative format. Thinking about the performance as a set of notes or more precisely structuring the performance as performance notes proved to be quite an adequate way of communicating the entirety of the project to the audiences.

BADco."

BADco. is a Zagreb based performing arts company with a core consisting of Pravdan Devlahovic, Ivana Ivkovic, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš and Zrinka Užbinec.

Sources: BADco. From the performance program at Oktoberdans 2008. 10.08.2010: www.badco.hr

BIT Teatergarasjen, Oktoberdans 2008. 10.08.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no -archive