Remembered Theatres : Gloss

Remembered Theatres

A theatre saturated by ghosts is, unfortunately, often orchestrated only by a reading of Derrida’s hauntology that leaves those spirits trapped in a state of recitation until their vibrations collapse in on themselves. His is a process by which nostalgia is felt for promised futures that never came to be and therefore results in (re)visitations by spectres of staunch anachronisms. Too often they are less than shades on tracks, less than stringed marionettes — all color has been bled out and only sepia-toned ache remains.

Instead, the ghosts of a remembered theatre glide out of an abyssal darkness with the music of deep time. They all carry banners of terror, despair, ecstasy, love, and laughter like a fantastical crusader horde becoming the very foe they’ve sworn to slay. They crowd the frontiers. In the absence of exposition, the defiance of reason, and an insistent dangerous sexy nonsense, they occupy virtual space like a catastrophe of heavenly angels. It is like a Dürer illustration of Dante with infinite concentric circles, but shrouded in grey-black darkness and filled with a voluptuous excess rather than a cold, stoic joy.

This remembered space is not zombified. Nor is it even penitent. It surrenders to the deluge that accompanies it.

 

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The infinite sepulchers marking the surface of the remembered theatre show the form of two. They are transi tombs and both visible effigial representations rest with the assumption that the “true” body lies in the earth below. Some saw a body go in once. None can see it now. You might feel it under there in your own bones, but cannot easily verify. This is a third leap to be taken. The fourth and final one is the reconstruction of any of these countless bodies. And this (re)creation can only happen by taking into account the previous three forms and adding any story/history/legend/presumption/bias that the visitor makes. The result is a fourth form created in reflection of the creator. Countless figures and countless visitors – unfathomable and fabulous co-creation.

Effigies in a theatre of sepulchral past can continue to change. They simultaneously act and are acted upon. They possess body and texture – the kind of texxture (à la Renu Bora or Eve K. Sedgwick) that carries the various histories of the object and the objects that made up that object. The marks of contact remain and evolve over time. There is work to making effigies.

The effigy seems to surrogate for the thing that once was. Just as there are many perspectives of the original, so too are there countless surrogates. Effigies must be made. Even unwillingly. And surrogates must act and be acted upon.

 

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In the rich darkness of this remembered theatre, I whisper my secrets to it and it rolls back.  I whistle out music from cracks in my mind, the notes ring out – full then hollow – full of leaves and crisp pastness before draining away with a deeper pang of loneliness than before. I whistle again, longer and louder, and it washes away lonelier still.

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.


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