memorandum
Dumb Type – the world-lauded Japanese multimedia performance group – finally inaugurated its presence in Singapore. Enough of curious butoh dance, or maniacal maenads from last year’s H.Art Chaos, you say.
In Dumb Type’s latest creation, memory as a protean subject is down-sized into a contemporary regime that is facelessly global, digital, and urban. There is no room for nostalgia onstage. Time, action and spectatorship are shuffled instead to reveal the vagaries of memory made complicated in today’s data and technology saturated age. The paranoia is this: if records of history can be enabled yet distorted by the electronic archive, how do we store memories for civilisation tomorrow?
The critical concern in memorandum may be pressing, and its arc seemingly large. But the theatrical tenor,
as orchestrated by metteur-en-scene Shiro Takatani, is delightfully witty, especially when conceptual ideas turn literal. Such is the scene where a task-performer repeatedly tosses her hair whilst orbiting a mound of shredded paper, fanning the fragments into a circle within which she is trapped.
To witness a typical Dumb Type multimedia performance is to doubtlessly subject oneself to a sensorial attack, even if the experience is not necessarily or truly tactile. A sonic maelstrom of high decibels and sampled noises, amplified by state-of-the-art woofers, sends a blood-rush. But oft-exploited as an effect device and for sound-bridging between scenes, Ryoji Ikeda’s composition this time flees from its larger thematic duty.
An aesthetic challenge to Dumb Type’s contemplation on phenomenology must surely be the issue of representation. In what ways can the abstract form of memory be embodied on stage? By necessity, the creators of memorandum eschew narrative linearity, in favour of vignettes. Some episodes are re-invented versions of the children’s tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. While other sequences draw evocatively on pure dance and performance-art tasks, the use of video – both live and recorded – is most dominant.
In its manifest form, memorandum relies on, and thus privileges, opticality. Like most Japanese product packaging, its chief seductive prowess is its stylish surface, disciplined by precision and varnished with detail. Perhaps a more sophisticated apprehension of memory – its devious and oft-intangible mechanism – is best captured in that tour-de-force scene where a performer silently scribbles the lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s “Unforgettable”. Meanwhile, in our mind, the evergreen tune roars.
This then is memory theatre. Neither illusionary nor pictorially descriptive, it becomes an implication.