Memoria
In a sitting room, before a steaming teapot, sit a Storyteller
and a strolling musician. Around them, on three small sofas and one
row of chairs a small group of spectators is assembled. The
violinist observes us with a quiet smile which sometimes verges on
sarcasm. The woman, the Storyteller, the priestess of the memory of
horror (because they are here to remember the horror), looks at us
as though she can see other faces through ours and wishes to find
in them the relief that comes with mercy. She speaks as though she
were telling fairy tales. Two tales. Two true stories. They concern
children, witnesses' accounts from the Nazi extermination camps,
but which end happily. Hebrew and Yiddish songs.
At times the Storyteller appears to be haunted, obscured by her
stories: she jumps with fright, her images become confused, she
pauses, radiating a childlike panic. The violinist watches over her
as though he were assisting a medium, a priestess whose supreme
energy is constantly on the brink of aphasia or insanity. And then,
when the two stories are ended, we see her fall into a state of
mute serenity. She is brooding over something which shakes her and
lulls her at the same time. The stories which she cannot forget
come back to dispel her peace, to torment her, to urge her on, and
she starts once more to narrate, following tracks which cancel each
other out. The winds of the mind and the impossibility to forget,
toss her about like an autumn leaf. She slips from one sentence to
the next, from one episode to another, mixes up people, forgets the
words and finds them again, connects lives and events that do not
belong together. Something essential is getting lost: not memory,
but the strength and the words capable of transmitting it without
succumbing. The performance ends as we look at the photographs of
two writers' faces: a smiling Primo Levi and a melancholic Jean
Améry, both Jews who had survived Auschwitz and committed suicide
years later. "Only two of us are left and we deal in bones."
Created in Holstebro on the basis of material elaborated by the
actress and the musician.
Actress
Else Marie Laukvik
Musician
Frans Winther
Text: Else Marie Laukvik in collaboration with
Eugenio Barba and Frans Winther.
Music: Frans Winther, and Yiddish songs.
Number of spectators per performance: 40
107 performances from March 1990
