Remember That Time

a new performance
by Lindsey Barlag Thornton with Sandy Barlag

Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago
curated as part of Actual Fiction
March, 2013

Interlacing my own lived memories with ideas of time from scientists, artists, and family, the performance teases out the relationship of past, present and future in the space and time of here and now. The performance utilizes scientific equations and historical dates to serve as various scores for action, e.g. Einstein’s General Relativity unifying time and space functions as a choreographical score for a remembering/re-mixing woman dancers who mark my present making; the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation theorizing the convergence of past, present, and future functions as a textual score, correlating to page numbers in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Within this structure, I embed my mother’s memories – her relationship to my grandfather, her pregnancy with me, and my birth; I interweave my own history as my mother layers her voice to the action of me baking a cake on stage. I search for my own memories of childhood by riding a bike (a memory I have no memory of, a memory “stuck in time”) generating a light to be powered for 6 minutes and 30 seconds (6/30 the date Einstein publishes Special Relativity, a theory he came up with while riding his bike).