Metaphors Of Memories

Guillaume Pigé didn’t set out to create a show about dementia when his theater company began working on “The Nature of Forgetting.” In fact, he maintains that the show — which depicts a man struggling through the early stages of the disease, and his journey with memory — isn’t a show about dementia. It’s a show about life and about the celebration of life.

What began with the questions, “What is eternal? What was true yesterday? What is true today? What will be true tomorrow?” eventually narrowed to “What is left when memory is gone?” And when Pigé and his troupe could not find an answer to their question, they created a show about it.

“I think that’s the point of theater. I think theater is a big rehearsal for life,” he says of working with potentially painful or difficult subjects. “The aim is to develop empathy so that we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. The show is there to unlock things that are maybe not talked about, that are maybe not discussed, that we keep deep down within ourselves.

“And it sort of brings me back to the name of the company,” he muses. “We’re called Theater

Re and the Re is the ‘re’ of re-discovering, re-inventing, revealing and reminding. We’re there to trigger discussions so that people are being reminded about the fragility of life and about what it means to be alive.”

Born of Pigé’s training in corporeal mime, Theatre Re creates inspiring and challenging productions that also engage experts in other fields. For “The Nature of Forgetting,” the company collaborated with London neuroscientist Kate Jeffery throughout the development process. Jeffery was at the center of the project, Pigé explains. The whole show was built around discussions with Jeffery and scientific discoveries she shared with the company.

“It really helped us to define how we were going to go about portraying forgetting,” Pigé shares. “How do you show on stage something that isn’t there? How do you make visible the invisible?

“As we started discussing with professor Kate Jeffery, we understood that when you remember, you don’t retrieve a memory, you reconstruct a memory. So every time it’s fresh; every time it’s new. And that’s quite exciting because if remembering means reconstructing, then forgetting means the deconstructing or misconstruction. So, suddenly, we had a tool to portray something which isn’t there. It gave us a performance language.”

That language comes together on stage in the form of mime, which is not at all the image most people likely form in their minds when they hear the word.

“Mime is about creating metaphors on stage. It’s about making the portrait of something with something else,” Pigé offers. “So, making the portrait of an idea, a state of mind, an emotion with something else — an object, your body, even your voice. It doesn’t really matter.

“And to me, mime is that the center of the theatrical process. Even though we’re working on a metaphorical level, on the realm of ideas, it’s always rooted in something quite real that people can identify with and therefore it will speak to people; it will reach people in a very specific way.”