Yangs_the institute of memory with Ciba edits
Created by Lars Jan, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), an earnest autobiographical performance about remembrance, is now online with On the Boards TV five years after its premiere at REDCAT, Los Angeles. The online production ironically adds an ironic layer of mediation to its original live version. A play about the violence of archives upon individuals, TIMe has become a digital archive itself, awaiting its audience to retrieve through a click.
As the overhanging fluorescent tubes map out the contour of an old apartment, a searching son leads the audience into his cold chamber of memory. He is patching together bits and pieces of his father’s untold life as a Polish Holocaust survivor and Soviet operative in post-war America. But more than a quest of family history, TIMe raises a broader question of how our memory is produced.
Creator of Holoscenes, Suicide Bombing, Abacus and other pojects, Lars Jan once elaborated on his idea in the interview with Artpulse, that “Art is research and performance is a lab”: “Art for me is inquiry, collision, curiosity about margins and a belief that the current frontiers are what we’ll eventually just call the backyard. Performance is the location in which my art practice happens.” From this idea Jan generates TIMe, where Jan uses his own memories as sources for a scientific observation. In this theatrical investigation of his father’s hidden history, Lars Jan sets himself as a narrating character that walks the audience through his memory of his father in a series of episodes, while intermittently jumps in to question and comment on the credibility of his own memories. With Jan’s integrated talents of design, directing, and writing, he lets memorial events collide, act, and react, creating a solemn space for investigation and contemplation.
A telephone and a typewriter----symbols of wiretaps and missives----are all we have on stage to trace the father’s story. The minimalist set of light tubes takes the viewer through different stages of the son’s journey through transformations. As it slowly rotates down from the ceiling, the once hovering, sealed, and vague space of memory is concretized as a crisscross barrier in the shape of a towering file shelf between father and son.
Embodied by Andrew Schneider and Sonny Valicent with Brechtian gestures, past figures shuffle back and forth in the jungle of light tubes, reenacting the son’s unreliable memory in an estranged fashion. The two performers’ bodies become anonymous containers which always proclaim their ephemeral roles in short statements as “I’m playing the man who became the father”, or “I’m playing the woman who became the wife”. The son’s remembrance of his father runs by in a rapid series of life episodes. Instead of bringing the audience closer to a strange misanthrope, this narrative device keeps them at a distance of skepticism. The so-called memory turns out to be no more than a patchwork of fragmental experiences and hearsays, flavored with some shoddy sauce of empathy. It drives the audience to interrogate whether our only solution to reconstruct memories exists in “authentic” records, as the son has no choice but to know about his father through documents and files. Moreover, the distancing effect of TIMe is reinforced by the experience viewing a filmed performance, because the audience before the screen has to perceive the story that is mediated through words and records yet through another layer of mediation.
Behind all these layers of stage crafts, Lars Jan’s restrained writing not only sketches the story in a succinct way, but also provokes the audience to reflect upon the tyranny of archives, and the entire literary apparatus that reifies real lives into erasable catalogue entries. In the forty-year-journey of TIMe, we get to know an inherently traumatized father, both victim and perpetrator who conceals every secret in his brain. We also empathize with the ever-questioning son, who finds himself lost in documents that destroyed his father, but meanwhile constructed his father’s life in the written history. TIMe reveals that memory is produced, preserved, and dominated by the institutionalized bureaucracy of literary apparatus. At the same time, it leaves the son’s bewilderment open for response: Is our own memory retrievable, if we are fundamentally alienated from its violent producing mechanism?