Cheri Hu’s Experience (Participant) [she/her]

“Our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves”.

Here’s me. I, the proprietary author of my life, here’s the story of me. And now I am going to take it apart like I do to my sandwich when someone puts onions in it. The death of the author. And in comes. 

“...memory equals events plus time”.

Movement scores became a time travel machine. To go back then, say hello, with the safety of hindsight protecting you from direct consequences. Sometimes I’m back there as an old friend. Sometimes as a stranger - a terrified observer. I became a regular visitor to my own archives. If memory equals events plus time, each visit to the archives then, I am a different visitor. Sometimes I’m the visitor with confidence and assurance that comes with age and knowledge. Sometimes I’m the visitor with the weight of shame still heavy on my back - the burden of memory hangs on thin thread - oscillating, oscillating. 

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind where you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened - when these new memories suddenly came upon me - it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream”.

The river ran upstream. I swam with the current of memories. 

“My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being”.

Excavation.

Is truth attainable? But actually, what’s the point then, when truth is attained? This journey in seeking truth, gives me purpose, so perhaps, I am in some parts taking detours and avoiding the point of truth. I swam nowhere, but I wasn’t lost. Do not pity me.

“And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory-loops”.

In this theatre space I carve out a small part, to sit with uncertainty in search for clarity. It sounds paradoxical. I have always taken it as paradoxical, that I fail to see how they could coexist. Now my past and present intersect. Come, sit with me at the intersection. 

I want to dance in the clouds, to reach that point of transcendence where one is free from the material world. As I rise further into the distance I might better figure what are the chains that shackle. And as I dance to the rhythm of my pulse, I move with the other bodies in the space, new beats, new beats. I dance and leap over a puddle, when all along it was a river in my head. Here, my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

“But what if, even at a later stage, our emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change?”

Then we revisit the story again. 

(Quotations are from The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes)