A dance that brings back the past

A special contemporary dance production “The Past” by Constanza Macras, Dorky Park and Oscar Bianchi will make stop in Sri Lanka on it’s South Asia Tour on Sunday February 15 at 7.00pm at the Museaus College Auditorium.

The critically-acclaimed dance performance choreographed by one of the international dance world’s favourites — Constanza Macras will be touring the South Asian region with performances in Bangalore and in Chennai, before they arrive

to share with Colombo audiences, a rare one night of magic in dance and music.

Presented in Sri Lanka by the Goethe-Institut in Colombo, the journey of THE PAST begins when Constanza Macras went to the city of Dresden and talked to eyewitnesses who can remember a city that no longer exists in the same form today, and recount the Dresden bombing of 1945. And so, THE PAST is rooted in a city and its histories, in a landscape of war and what comes after, in a situation of survival and change, in remembrance and forgetting. This is a perfor-

mance that really explores (and explodes) the art of memory or ars memoriae: memories that are particularly strongly associated with physical locations, rooms and architecture.

The starting point is the city as a concrete geographical location, as an anchor for memory, a mental picture and a cast of mind. What happens with our memories, what happens to those who still remember when these physical places are destroyed?

THE PAST is a collaborative work made with Swiss/Italian composer Oscar Bianchi, who composed a music score that delves into collective and individual memory. Exploring spaces between written and oral practice, the music embodies both the depth and the contradictions that rites of passage, communication and memory entail in the sphere of sound, and celebrate sound as a physical, sometimes muscular, place where emotional and existential realities find in memory an independent and sometimes ruleless form of storage.