Sensation and Memory in Emilyn Claid’s Remember to Forget (2003) and Gilles Deleuze’s Discussion of Francis Bacon’s Paintings

Abstract

Remember to Forget (2003) is the third of a trilogy of works made by Emilyn Claid as part of the writing and performance-making research project entitled Embodying Ambiguities.² One of Claid’s key concerns in making the piece was to investigate the relations between identifiable narratives and abstract movement in dance language by drawing on research carried out in the two earlier works in the trilogy. Of these, Shiver Rococo (1999) addressed detailed abstractions of dance language, and No Bodies Baby (2002) used narratives and relationships between performers to address a space/time dynamic framework. Claid’s investigation of the play between narrative and abstraction resulted in an intense violence of sensation in the movement material performed and her references to other works in the trilogy involved plays with memories. Other memories, such as those of Claid’s previous works, of different movement vocabularies in the performers’ bodies, and of events that conjured emotions and sensations for Claid and the performers, were also sources, as were the ways in which this piece challenged spectators’ memories of presence in performance. There was a recognition that however ‘abstract’ a stylised dance vocabulary might be, in itself it would harbour shadows of past-performance stories, hence the embodied ambiguity of plays between abstraction and narrative, intertwined with and generated by memories.

An earlier version of this chapter was given as part of a keynote address to the Nordic Forum for Dance Research at their Annual Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2004 and this was published in the conference proceedings.