志异 Draft by Drama box december 2013 (english) | Page 60

dr af t vo l 2 is su e 2

m e m o r y x s p ac e

t h ea t r e a -b-c

60

playing and consumption, and
taught the students the ‘correct’
way of catching cockroaches.
Through these activities, the
movement of memories is
multi-directional. There is
movement from the personal
to the social and vice versa.
Through games and devising
activities, aesthetics signs also
emerged. For example, a
common event which the
participants remembered was
the 1960 racial riots, when they
were either children or teenagers.
The sight of the angry crowds from
a second-storey shophouse, the
clanging of a metal pot in the
kampong to warn of impending

threats, the visual image of a
brother leaving the house with
lea?ets were all strong signs.
These contributed to my
direction of the eventual piece.
Through the devising, one
question I asked myself
repeatedly was, ‘How could I
select speci?c memories and
their accompanying emotions
to be moved to the next space
aesthetically and authentically?’
The process of moving the
memories from the social space
to the theatre space was for me
a challenging one because of
the above question.

–
while mem
encoded and
the brain, t
sometime
becomes a r
of memori
external sti
introduced
brain, the m
could be expr
the body, alm
it is a re?ex
–