| Mnemonic Links "...seeking what is most alive, integrating text, music, image and action to create surprising, disruptive theatre..." -Theatre d' Complicite "In 1991 tourists descending a 3000-metre peak discover a shrivelled naked body emerging from the ice. How old is it? A man alone in his London flat, unable to sleep, searches in his memory. Or does he imagine? Place and memory collide while stories that are older than the millennium connect to stories that surround us in everyday life. Stories of journeys fragment, reflect, repeat and revolve like the act of memory itself as Mnemonic questions our understanding of time, our capacity to distort history and our attempts to retell the past." --Theatre d' Complicite on Mnemonic. Mnemonic was a landmark production of Theatre d' Complicite, founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon--currently headed by Artistic Director Simon McBurney. This piece brought Complicite's iconoclastic edge and unparalleled spellbinding [astiche of new media technology in performance to the attention of critics and the theatre world: winning the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Achievement off Broadway for Unique Theatrical Experience, and the Critic's Circle Award for Best New Play (to name a few). Since it's founding in 1983, the company has beendedicated to staging authentic works, theatrical adaptations, and revivals of classic texts--the ensemble focuses on immersing both viewer and performer in a hypnotically seamless integration of new media with physical performer, of dreamscape with reality. Complicite's original production, Mnemonic, is both particularly fascinating to me and a landmark in theatre/new media art as their originality and vision situated gallery / experimental venues of performance and installation art in traditional theatre, rupturing and transforming the proscenium setting with their mesmerizing hybrid between play, digital video, dance, photography, and sculpture. Submitted
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