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Mnemosyne [Concept, Choreography and Live Performance]

Mnemosyne is a re-membering of 3 dance-architecture events performed through a

choreographic installation. Through a process of critical mythologizing, the figure of Mnemosyne and her pool of remembrance are evoked in the performing of an affective archive. Performed in and around the New Zealand installation for the 2011 Prague Quadrenniale - Fly-Tower: A Live Archive - the solo activates the tower as an archival repository of objects, choreographed gestures and sounds. In recreating moments from three productions, Her Topia (Athens 2005), Aarero Stone (Wellington 2006) and Tongues of Stone (Perth 2011) the work invites visitors to the installation to engage with the performer in a process, not just of witnessing the impossible task of recovery of past performances, but participation in the reinvention of traces of the archive through physical interventions. In this way, the flytower, an apparatus of theatrical reproduction, is re-imagined as a place that holds, not only props and costumes, but also gestures, feelings and emotions.

In summoning the past through the objecthood of artefacts, Mnemosyne plays between the contingency of a singular performance and the accumulative force of what Schneider (2001) terms ‘performance remains’. Artefacts of performance are recombined in proximity to visitors to the installation who become participants in a process of re-visioning. Rather than past works being understood as archivable events they are reconstituted as affective traces capable of being reconfigured through what Hannah (2011) terms sceno-architecture. Mnemosyne was one of seven exhibitions selected to represent New Zealand as part of the National Exhibition in the National Gallery Veletztrni Palace, 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design + Space (500 events, 50,000 visitors).