When We Were Birds (2012-13) dance theatre collaboration with Esther Linley. Graeme Miller and Lucy Cash (Centre of The Body, Goldsmiths)

This project was triggered by Bruno Bettelheim’s controversial memoir/analysis of the loss of self in mass society, based on his incarceration in Buchenwald, The Informed Heart:
‘[…] a group of naked prisoners was about to enter the gas chamber […] the commanding SS officer learned that one of the women prisoners had been a dancer. So he ordered her to dance for him. She did and as she danced, she approached him, seized his gun, and shot him down. […] isn’t it probably that despite the grotesque setting in which she danced, dancing made her once again a person?’

When We Were Birds is a memory work: Overlapping personal with historical memory it explores how the body might be understood as constituting memory – a contested idea – and how the sense of self is deeply tied into embodied experience; it investigates the instability of memory as fact, ‘psychophysical’ memory and political history as a mnemonic backdrop to a shared childhood training with the Royal Ballet, and conforming to and resisting gender culture whilst the swinging sixties rocked. Research is empirical and interdisciplinary. Key consultants include Cambridge Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Nicola Clayton (bird memory specialist) and psychotherapist/cultural theorist Susie Orbach, representing two inconsonant theories of the Mind: neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Their contribution has enlightened the research question: What actually occurs in the mind-body when the older retired dancer re-members movement sequences performed decades earlier?

Conceived and directed by Furse, the project has culminated in a duet performance premiered at Cantieri Culutrali Zisa, Palermo (2013) with a co-producer in Ireland (Create Ireland) and producer Paula Van Hagen. A solo version was performed at the Live Collision Festival, Dublin and GIFT Festival, Newcastle in 2014.

The project is funded by ACE and supported by Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa.

Interview with Professor Furse about the performance on the Live Collision vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/95181565

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/8846