MEMODROME

Memodrome – created and coined by applied drama practioner and researcher Anca Doczi  – is a participatory theatre device allowing members of the audience to immerse themselves into the performance of memories delivered by their natural owners, within an aestheticised form of oral storytelling. During the performance, the audience is invited to witness the world of the memories testified to them through a guided interaction with performers and to participate in the performance of those memories by sharing their own experiences and thoughts. Thereby, a Memodrome audience constitutes a collective of authors who simultaneously devise and influence the artistic content by listening and telling, by making choices in terms of the actions they take, by orchestrating a narrative structure for themselves and by the textual/verbal interventions they develop during the performance.

Memodrome technique is aimed at empowering communities to claim their identity through performative means that are already familiar and personal to them such as the recollection and the telling of memory. Conceptually, the tehnique is informed and inspired by the Romanian tradition of the Sezatoareand seeks to revitalise its functions. However Memodrome aims beyond the local perspective of the tradition and endeavour to broaden the functionality of the technique by articulating those aspects that are universal to humans irrespective of their ethnic or racial background: the need to share memories, to tell stories and to unite in the feeling of belonging.

Memodrome is the result of a search to create a platform where the human experience of a difficult past is communicated through raw and direct testimony of lived events, which does not attempt to convey the historic truth as fact but to reveal the individually remembered reality of a collective past and to open new areas of inquiry into the rebuilding of communities affected by conflict.