Forging Memories

Remembering What Never Happened * Bridgman|Packer Dance

"Remembering is always also a form of imagining."

Siri Hustvedt

There is a connection between memory and creation. In an article for Smithsonian Magazine, Greg Miller describes the process by which we "make" memories:

"Scientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons. Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain (the human brain has 100 billion neurons in all), changing the way they communicate."

In other words, the act of remembering something literally changes the connections in your brain - and thereby changes that very memory. And since remembering involves telling yourself the story of an event or moment, each act of remembering contains within in it the seed of a new creation or moment in time.

As I sat this evening watching Remembering What Never Happened, a world premiere performance from Bridgman|Packer Dance, this idea kept spiraling through my thoughts. I would see Myrna dancing a duet with images of herself from a moment ago, the time lag creating a strange poignancy, or Art's movements echoing down an endless line of projected Arts - and I had the strangest sense of being dropped into my own memories.

We've all been there, I think: we've chased the lover or loved one who is vanishing; we've tried to hold the memory of someone lost so close that it felt like we were imprinting it on our bodies; we've found ourselves staring at a funhouse mirror of our own repeated mistakes coming back at us. And yet, when Bridgman|Packer explore these feelings in front of us, we can see both our own specific examples of moments, and also a much larger story about the very deliberate creation process we undertake as we pack away and then unpack our memories.

In the piece, which runs through Sunday, July 19th at the Opera House, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer explore and explode what it means to remember, to dream, to create. Using a fascinating blend of pre-recorded footage and live camera capture with simultaneous video projection, the pair are able to physicalize the sense of being lost in your own memories - of feeling a familiar path behind you and yet seeing the ghost traces of other paths that you might just as easily have taken.