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When We Were Birds

This project was triggered by The Informed Heart, Bruno Bettelheim’s controversial memoir of the loss of self in mass society, based on his incarceration in Buchenwald:

‘[…] a group of naked prisoners was about to enter the gas chamber […] the commanding SS officer learned that one of the women prisoners had been a dancer. […] he ordered her to dance for him. She did and as she danced, she […] seized his gun, and shot him down. […] isn’t it probably that despite the grotesque setting in which she danced, dancing made her once again a person?’

WWWB is a memory work. Overlapping personal with historical memory, it explores how the body might constitute memory; how the self is deeply tied into embodied experience. It investigates the instability of memory-as-fact, ‘psychophysical’ memory and political history as a mnemonic backdrop to specific, shared experiences: childhood training with the Royal Ballet; and conforming to or resisting the gender culture of the ‘swinging sixties’. Research is empirical and interdisciplinary. Consultants include Cambridge cognitive neuroscientist Professor Nicola Clayton (bird memory specialist) and psychotherapist and cultural theorist Susie Orbach, representing controversial theories of the mind: neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Their contribution has enlightened the question: what actually occurs in the mind-body when the older retired dancer remembers movement sequences performed decades earlier?

Conceived and directed by Furse, the project premiered at Cantieri Culutrali Zisa, Palermo (2013), followed by Furse’s video presentation at the Déjouer l’Injouable Colloquium, University of Grenoble, November 2013. The research findings to date have been published as ‘Retracing our Steps… On When We Were Birds’ in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy and Rhonda Blair (Methuen, 2013). Supported by ACE, WWWB is touring in 2014 by Live Collision in Ireland and will tour internationally.