Drowse - Failing Memory Theatre (Prologue)

Video by Kyle Bates/drowse for the 2021 Roadburn Redux Festival. Croatian philosopher Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theatre, as described in historian Frances A. Yates’ The Art of Memory, is an impossible to realize work that takes the form of a theatre in which the spectator(s) stands where the stage would be and looks out at where an audience would traditionally sit. The spectator views a complex series of interrelated symbolic images that are meant to encapsulate the entire history of human memory. Each symbol acts somewhat like a mnemonic device that triggers a “innate“ memory knowledge (Camillo referred to this knowledge as primary matter). Failing Memory Theatre (Prologue) is a contextually minimalist play on Camillo’s idea. Instead of the entire memory of human history, Failing Memory Theatre (Prologue) externalizes my single-human memories of the work I’ve created as Drowse. This sort of internal experience knowledge is the inverse of Camillo’s primary matter–only accessible throu