“A story, once told, opens a gate for the one who tells it and the one who listens.”
You and your community are cordially invited to our Memory Palace…
libretto
“Strange, the story I’ve heard –unsettling as a dream…”
In a Memory Palace concerns itself with the destabilization of memory and identity due to age, cognitive impairment, displacement, or social isolation. The main character, a Viennese Catholic who relinquished her privilege as an “Aryan” to flee Hitler’s Europe with her Jewish husband, has endured all these experiences and is haunted by confused memories. The script dramatizes the plight of the sequestered elderly, while acknowledging that family members must often divide their attention among loved ones each of whom, in theory, deserves undivided attention.
Playwright Edith Newton’s libretto follows the traditional structure and prosody of a Japanese Noh play. The work was conceived as a Noh play because of the extent to which Noh stages the phenomenon of a person’s being located in one place and time in the physical world but existing much more intensely in a world of memory.
music
“At moments like this, if we listen, we will hear…”
The music of In a Memory Palace, co-composed by TN members David Crandall and Kevin Salfen, moves fluidly between the spare, intense stillness of noh and the opulence of late 19th- and early 20th-century Viennese concert music. Scored for the four instruments of the traditional noh ensemble (taiko, otsuzumi, kotsuzumi and nohkan) as well as piano, cello and piccolo, it is itself a cross-cultural odyssey that reflects and enhances the multiple, fragmented worlds of Newton’s text.
“My great gift was this: to make others beautiful...”
Masks
Master mask maker Kitazawa Hideta has created two stunning masks to be worn by the Hedwig Müller character in the play’s first and second halves, respectively. In the first half, Hedwig’s ghost inhabits the body of an elderly resident in a nursing home in modern-day America. In the second half, she appears as a sumptuous beauty reliving the prime of her life in interwar Vienna.
costumes
Costume designer Margaret Mitchell’s exquisite costumes reflect the two realities of the nursing home and Viennese haute couture while satisfying the needs of noh-based choreography. The result is a visual feast that complements the subtle poignancy of the masks.
sets
Scenographer Mikiko Uesugi’s set is informed by the traditional noh stage, with elements inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna, distilled to their essence.
Video
By linking the traditional and contemporary through its use of noh and video, In a Memory Palace is a kind of moving musical sculpture dedicated to generating and exploring the way memory loops, snags, repeats, accumulates and encrypts itself. Video artist Ryan Yu employs moving images to convey lives that have been going on for some time. Time is conveyed through moving images that interact with the live action to magnify and deepen the impact and the material quality of memory.
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