Rehearsals week of 3-15

Playing with miniture objects as representations of a place or event, using them to map a memory, versions of that memory, planes of view/movement, projection/shadow

Discussion with dancers about collections, souvenirs. An object representing a special place or memory. Go to Disney Land, buy a Mickey Mouse, bring home. What if we did this with our daily lives? Go to dinner at my parents’ house, and a small little house figurine represents it on my mantle. Beth asked, is it because Disney Land was special, a thing you only do once or a few times? Places you go only once? That makes we question how we define special: that dinner at my parents’ house only happens once, may be special, but we look at differently and it doesn’t seem as special (though it’s just as fleeting an event as the day at Disney Land...). Also brings up that people that do collect many things. My parents and grandparents have houses full of stuff. My grandma more so, though she is passing things along to my parents! Do people accumulate those things because they are tied to memories, physical representations of things that otherwise exist in trace/memory only? We are trying this mapping (as in Invisible Cities -- a place that exists only in the order in which it is experienced: my house on the left, across the street a church, then the dry cleaner...) and placing of objects as a physicalization of that concept. The dancers document the events with the figurines, then collect as many as possible. Different configurations of the figurines represent their different memories, different perceptions/versions of the same place. They try to accumulate as many as possible so they can keep the memory as theirs. Something doesn’t work about this but can’t pinpoint what. Will keep playing.