After the Fact: Memory, Experience, Technology

Abstract

Recording ourselves, re-creating our experience and our narrative accounts of history, and remembering and memorializing the events of our own time and other times are central preoccupations of theatre of the real. Social order is created out of shared memory, and the creation and continuity of shared memory is a function of performances across the spectrum of theatre of the real where memory is treated as a cultural activity enacted with texts, images, and physical presence. Social memory, writes Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember, involves both memory and bodies. The creation of social memory is at work in bodily practices of both groups of people and individuals. Documentary evidence, Connerton writes, has a status comparable to the status of a text, but social memory is created and challenged through collective performative acts of individuals (1989:4). Recording individual memory of collective events in the form of performance shapes spectators’ memories of events they may or may not have witnessed. Memory is used to form pictures, construct cases, make arguments, create historic ruptures, and situate the spectator in history. Memory as testimony, as proof, as evidence of experience, events, and history is at work in bodily practices, in textual inventions, and technological innovations.KeywordsShared MemoryCompany MemberSocial MemoryLive PerformanceCultural MemoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.