CAN DIGITAL THEATRE DELETE A LIVING THEATRE MEMORY?
The article that you’re about to read is derived from a personal experience. It talks about theatre memories and how they can survive-if they can survive after watching the same theatrical performance digitally.
What happens when we can live again the same experience we had in the theatre-but now-watch again the same performance through a screen-in our laptop or in a local cinema? A 2D experience now, maybe tries to remind us what we’ve been through the live one, but are her intentions that good? Or does it want to force herself into our mind, replace the original theatrical experience, delete that forever?
To be able to remember every single scene, every single movement of every actor, the digital theatre, yes gives us that. We can watch it and re-watch it as many times as we want but, that’s not the point of the theatre at all. Theatre is what gives you that exact time, in that exact hall where you sit around hundreds of people watching, feeling something entirely private.
Was it meant to remember everything when a month, a year, a decade passes after a theatrical performance? NO. Memories are to fade. Because this is why they are made for. When you go back and remember a favourite theatrical experience you are not meant to remember the play from the beginning until the ending, this is what cinema does, or a favourite movie. But recalling this unique theatrical experience, it can give you those intense images, carved in your brain, that no camera could ever record. Your theatrical experience is unique and in my opinion, if it is very important it must stay that way. You don’t have to feel guilty of not remembering every single scene of the play, that is not the point, but what this play, this event gave you at the end, when the curtain fell.
I will repeat myself. Memories are to fade, and a sweet scene and energy abstracting that specific date in a specific place, from people, from those artists, live on that stage, that is what should remain.
I am still afraid of that power of digital theatre. Replacing all those little, short, loved private memories that we, as a theatrical audience have kept sacred into the deep tunnels of our brains, that short quantity of magic that is flushed away with time, the distinctiveness of that memory must stay untouched.
Anastasia Manou