This piece plays with, and trips up, the notion of memory. It is as much to do with what is lost as it is to do with what is remembered. The task itself has an impossibility embedded in its demands – it is endless and unforgiving. It questions how and why we remember.
We stand in front of an audience with an unfamiliar list. Through our public learning of this ‘script’ we are trying and failing, testing ourselves and getting it wrong. The task insists upon this language of song titles being heard, being memorised, being repeated, being said out loud.
This creates a space in which new layers of meaning can be found within the found language of love songs. Through the process of collecting, re-ordering, memorising and performing these words.
Something happens when Hannah repeats the line ‘my baby left me’ as a way to try and remember the next one. This moment slips between the demands of learning the task and a confession to a room of strangers.
When Rachel gets stuck on “I just don’t know what do with myself”, she waits silently hoping that someone else will help her remember what to say next.
Slowly, we each get better at saying the list, sometimes in unison and sometimes alone. This list of song titles becomes like a mantra. A rhythm forms, but this rhythm is punctuated with the silence of not knowing. These silences are full of density and waiting.
In the minds of the performers and the audience, these words are no longer just a list of song titles.
They have become something else.
This performance grew from a set of instructions for a game we devised called “A Lesson in Love”. The game revolves around compiling a list of at least fifty song titles and then learning the list “by heart” until you reach the point at which you can “say the list out loud without hesitations or stumbles”. The song titles are all from songs that contain the words (or are in some way related to) love and loneliness.
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photos: paul nulty
(performance) Exposure Gallery, Swansea Fringe Festival, October 2005
(performance) Scratching/multi avond, TENT, Rotterdam, March 2004
(performance) Three Minute Warning, Exeter Phoenix, November 2003