The remembered theatre used to be, and could be again, made of a simple composition. It begins with a worn and unsweepable wooden floor cloaked in faded red curtains. At the very center of the stage is a desperate, bright light. It haunts the heart of the space. It wants you to believe it is radiating out and upward along the soft fabric edges. Here the curtains are tapestries encrusted with generations of dust collected from countless audiences. Yet, all those multitudinous eyeballs were unable to see it accumulating in front of them, buzzing under the nails and in the pores. Eyes can only see the particles cascading in the glare of the light in shafts that seem to disappear. Few give a thought to where they vanish. They are content with magic.

Beyond the edge of the light, the shadowed folds of the curtains could drop off into an endless absence. But that dark could also crackle with possibility, charged with glee like a deep inhale verging on expulsion. That dark is bated with tension, with pounding and terrifying urges for ecstatic destruction that tear the body apart with painful laughter and wild, strange longings. This is how the shadows articulate the space.

It is a charge that swirls around, undeniable even to the adolescent pair concealed behind rows of chairs in the balcony fondling each other in a sweaty, smiling heap on the floor. They cannot breathe with the thrill of secret performance, alone and yet cosmically exposed in the dark. Even this pair, shielded from the ghost light, is submerged.

In a remembered theatre, light does not shine out but that does not imply the ghost light pulls inward. Rather, it is the shadow – fecund with sound and spirits and electricity – that floods slowly in towards the center. Contrary to sickly histories of settler conquests, the frontier is overpopulated. The periphery is thickly knotted with timelines as generations gather in velvety echoes like sound waves dancing around stone rafters. Between all the noise a deafening quiet pulls at the base of your skull until it completely envelopes the head with the suffocating thickness of velour curtains caking the cracks in your fingers with dust.

Enfolded deeper in the purple phosphoric haze of this Lynchian spectralscape is a vision of a theatre entombed. This is a space that transforms with each visitation and reflects with more clarity than any mirror. It is an endless landscape of sepulchers, a vast organic sprawl that defies any orders of emplotment. You cannot always find the mausoleum you seek but there are plenty for you to transform into what you need. Sometimes you arrive where you desired only to discover that it wasn’t what you thought. This space is all contrary planes enmeshed together in a thick rhizome of tree roots, fields of enigmatic stones and patches of grass, torches, brambles, and souvenirs of love or neglect. It is peopled by bodies in the ground and carved memories atop.

An effigy lying on a slab, staring up to the heavens with stony eyes: what does it see? Is its gaze fixed on pipes, scaffolding, and bright electrical lights searing back down? Is it straining to peek past the blaze to catch a private glimpse of the ceiling – its paint hanging off in moldy slices? Or is the firmament a heavy black mass, a glimmerless void with no depth or definition, its absence crushing?

Then the patience of ages will produce the soft hues of color, at first mistaken for film in the eyes until stars appear and multiply. The cosmos grows in intensity until the abrupt vastness of color and light undulates, becoming sky that flows like clear violent rivers to form surging mountains with explosions of steam and clear blue magma racing above as if the globe were spinning off its axis and yet crawling to a halt. The depth of time bubbles up as sensations fly and circles form and collapse to form again. Bodies burn to nothing in ecstasy and everything swirls and collapses and swirls again. It is high noon in a black hole and everything is flat singularity – a single note ringing until explosion as everything cries out. Falling through stars and mountains and falls and clouds and warm stone cooling in silence. The earth smells wet, full of rot and life.

This remembered theatre cannot represent that sky nor does it hope to. It does give new lives to those who have seen it; and many who never will. It wastes greatly – and recycles as it can –

making the most of rags and bones. The boundary and the center become whole – an infinity of loops without limit. The seeming paradox of this work is not dissimilar from the misperception that if theatre is a mausoleum then it must be a city of dead things, a receptacle for the inert. But the truth is that such a space of decay is also one of new possibilities. The dark and the dust are preconditions for re-membering. This imagined theatre gives space and body for such work to continue anew and differently with each repetition.