JEDEN – 2011

“A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history.” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1896, tr. Paul and Scott Palmer, 1911, p. 63)

I am what I remember.

How do two men speaking different languages manage to understand each other? What happens in our heads when we dream? Why does advanced technology offer an understanding of the process of death, but leave us unable to save lives? How did the painter Roman Opalka feel when he wrote the number 1,000,000 on his canvas? How can a fish live its whole life in a tank without getting bored? What happens in our brains when we make decisions? Why have we forgotten that little Omayra Sanchez died in Colombia in 1984 with the whole world watching her on television? Why can you commit suicide while looking at a beautiful landscape? Why do cats hunt mice in their sleep? What do we love most in life? Is there an afterlife?

Is all the information we receive in the course of our lives lost? Do all the images we see disappear into what we call oblivion, or do they remain in our minds, forming thousands of new links and connections to create new meaning? Is this new meaning a new form of knowledge, or is it merely an unconscious strategy to protect us from the impact of what we have seen or experienced? The body, confronted with the fractures and dissonances of memory, faces the problem of its representation. If the word is the palpable trajectory of thought that bears witness to our existence, the passage of time eliminates all traces of our presence on earth.

JEDEN forms the third component  of PENSCENIQUES, a theatre project based on the confrontation of different brain functions and inspired by theories of the “double bind”: a crisis in communication in which an individual or group receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages.

DIRECTION & SCRIPT: Marcelino Valiente 

PERFORMERS: Marcelino Valiente & Gard Frostad Knudstad

MUSIC: Ulykken courtesy of Rune Mikael Glimsdal; extracts from Detail, Roman Opalka courtesy of Christophe Loizillon

DRAMATURGICAL ADVISER: Ole Johan Skjelbred-Knudsen

PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION: Gunhild Bjørnsgaard

LIGHTING: Jean Vincent Kerebel & Marcelino Valiente

VIDEO: Marcelino Valiente