Dorothea’s Questions

Dorothea’s Questions

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

In search of an answer I invited the audience o help us out. This week, on Friday, we had our 4th edition of the informal discussion at the Goethe Institut NYC entitled Words on the Wall. I invited my dancers to show a section of Wallstories which has it’s world premier next week in the Gallery space. The section, I selected, was about memory and how we reconstruct memory. So I asked the audience to watch the dance and write down some answers about reconstructing history and memory and this is what they came up with. As you can see from below we got more questions than answers. I think that this is the most interesting part of life that you keep asking questions and you keep being curious about life. How boring would life be if we had all the answers.

 

...community, talk- meet, triggers- sound and vision....


I believe in physical and sensory components of memory. When you sometimes smell or move you are suddenly reminded of a past event or occasion and you realize how much of the memory is implanted through moments or sensations.....

 

Memory: made up of the repetition of stories we tell ourselves and others as well as the stories that are told to us.....

 

You remember things via story-telling, identification and imagination....

 

Memory is partly due to intense pain or pleasure.....

 

A memory can be a total coincidence due to a chemical process in the brain.....

 

Connection through personal stories that allow the person to put themselves in other’s shoes....

 

There is a distinct difference in reading and learning history through text vs. display of emotion. This movement gave me the ability to interpret the event from my own personal perspective and allowing history through memory to live on.....

 

The concept of nostalgia for events or a period which one has not personally experienced is very interesting. Why do we feel connected to moments that we were not present for? Is it related only through empathy, ones capacity for empathy or does it touch on some deeper need to connect?

 

Many of my childhood memories are in fact not authentic. There are stories superimposed onto photographs, I have seen in albums. Often my sister and I will confuse our experiences with each other because we have heard the same stories from our parents. They are stories we remember because we have told them, even though they are about us. Does that mean that the memories are not real or less relevant?

 



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