As the I Remember … performance drew closer, Matt became more and more convinced that it was going to make a truly important statement. The impact he had hoped to make with his The Art of Memory exhibition paled in comparison to the new insights he was sure Gina and Ingrid’s project would provide. When he mentioned this to Ingrid, she kindly said it was only because The Art of Memory had closed while I remember … was still going on.
The weekly workshops gave way to nightly rehearsals. Ingrid and Gina argued endlessly about the inevitable effects of this kind of repetition on the freshness of the original memories, and about how to account for those effects in a responsible way, but they all agreed that rehearsal was a necessary evil. Since it was impossible to rehearse the oral elements and the movement elements all in the same room at the same time, Matt arranged for an additional space in the museum. Gina asked him to attend the sessions where the performers — for that is what they were becoming — honed their monologues and recitations, while Ingrid worked with the dancers and Gina would float back and forth. He thought it was a clumsy attempt to keep him apart from Ingrid but quickly became obsessed with his new responsibility. He would make suggestions here and there, and came to see himself as something approaching an associate director, though he would never have admitted it to either Gina or Ingrid.
The monologues and recitations had been carefully curated with an eye to the variety they could add to the presentation. He found something new and interesting in each of them every night.
There were readings from Proust and Márquez: the madeleines of Swann’s Way and the almonds of Love in the Time of Cholera. Matt had suggested those, said he couldn’t see how they could be left out. Gina resisted at first — he suspected it was the gender of the writers — but eventually relented. Matt supposed Ingrid had had to concede on some other point in order to buy Gina’s assent.
The highlight on the oral side of the performance, Matt thought, was the segment in which three people recounted their personal memories of the destruction of the Twin Towers. The accounts were very detailed. And identical. After the third had been delivered, the witnesses were asked to state where they were on September 11. One was in Yellowknife, one in Toronto, and one in Fredericton. They would then project on a screen the widely broadcasted video footage that was responsible for creating this stunningly homogenized “memory.”
Ingrid’s enthusiastic nightly updates on the development of the dance performances were often long and significantly reduced the time available for lovemaking before he had to return home. Although he always felt the dance portion must lose something being translated into words, he could tell from her enthusiasm that something impressive was being created. When the two groups finally reunited in the week before the performance was to take place, his faith was vindicated.
The show would open in very dim light with Ingrid and Gina performing a pas de deux. The idea was very simple: Ingrid repeated Gina’s movements on a five-second delay. Originally, they had planned to be nude. Matt was relieved when they decided to wear body stockings after all. He knew the decision had nothing to do with modesty, but the outcome was the same so he didn’t care. As the finale of the dance, four yards of Kraft paper were to be unrolled and Ingrid and Gina were going to leapfrog over one another, printing a row of fading images of their bodies in blue pigment. Neither, it turned out, had wanted to roll naked in the paint.
Beginning at a point three minutes into the opening pas de deux, a delayed video feed of the entire evening’s performance would play on a large screen, interrupted only for the showing of the Twin Towers footage. This had been Gina’s idea — a nod to Sontag, she said, and what she called living by proxy. Ingrid found it a distraction and cautioned against trying to say too much and splitting the focus too widely, but in the end she agreed, in the interests of peace. Also running throughout the evening — although at intervals, and live — was a demonstration of the endurance of procedural memory. The oldest woman in the group (Matt thought that was just by chance) repeated a mime version of her nighttime ablutions while groups of other performers bombarded her with distractions that ranged from shouted instructions about doing things differently to recited lists of medical products and litanies of recipes for complicated lemon desserts.
Matt was most nervous about what he and Ingrid had come to call “The Fuckin’ Foucault.” He didn’t doubt the performers’ ability to pull it off. It was the voice-over that he had provided that he was afraid might fall flat, pulling the rest down with it.
The idea had come from a passage Gina had read, secondhand somewhere, from Foucault. It went, she said, something like this: in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. They had already been developing, in the workshop, a piece about how acts of memory become reliant on the preservation of physical objects. Modern memory and the archive, they wanted to say, have become one and the same. We save even our garbage on the off chance that it might become significant later, creating a new class of objects and events: the potentially memorable. The Foucault passage supplied the organizing image they needed, and Ingrid went to work. The entire group would be involved. One after another, they would pile cardboard banker’s boxes onto a pyramid that would finally tumble, with the contents of the boxes spilling at the audience’s feet. The papers and receipts and candy wrappers, condoms, and champagne corks that littered the floor would then be slowly and reverentially gathered and re-boxed and the pyramid rebuilt. The piece would end with the performers inviting the audience to join them in venerating the monument. Matt’s voice-over, which developed the idea of the potentially memorable, seemed to him overly obvious, but Ingrid and Gina assured him it was only because he was so familiar with the work. An audience would need the guidance, they insisted. He was more than a little afraid that some of what he had to say might be misinterpreted by his museum colleagues, who, after all, might be seen to earn their livings on the backs of items and events that were deemed merely potentially memorable.
“I don’t think the fabric is working.”
Ingrid made this announcement as he was unhooking her bra and it took him a moment to understand that she was referring to the performance.
“If we could have got the felt pieces to cooperate, that would have been great.” She and Gina had experimented with the Robert Morris / Penelope Reade idea for weeks. They had auditioned different weights and cuts of felt in hopes of getting them to morph before the audience’s eyes, remembering and returning to their former form. Or forgetting their current one (it didn’t matter which). When they could get no result that was really telling, they had decided to try a different fabric-based approach. Ingrid had demonstrated it to him with one of her Skogsnarv sheets, first clarifying that in the performance she would probably not be naked.
“Gina will drape me with a length of cloth so that I am completely covered. I’ll be standing like Jesus on the cross so the fabric will take on a pretty recognizable form,” she had said. “Then she’ll turn her back and when she looks again my arms will have drooped. Then again, and I’ll be squatting. She’ll set me up again and I’ll sag again. It’s as close as we think we can get to your mother’s experiments.”
But the fabric was not cooperating, she said. They couldn’t make the idea work. Unless it was tightly wrapped around individual body parts, making a mummy of Ingrid, the cloth tended to slip off and reveal the body beneath. They had tried Velcro but there were distracting sounds of tearing when it got stressed, and the soundtrack for the piece (slow breathing) wasn’t enough to cover them up.
“I’m sorry, Matt. I really wanted to make something work.”
Matt didn’t tell her he was relieved. Ingrid and Gina had worked so hard, but he had really never wanted his mother involved in the first place. “Do you have an idea to fill the gap?” he said.
“There’s something I’ve thought about, but I need your help.”