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The Past explores the art of memory, or ars memoriae, in which memories are particularly strongly associated with physical locations, rooms and architecture. The starting point is the city as a concrete geographical location, as an anchor for memory, a mental picture and a frame of mind. What happens with our memories, what happens to those who remember when these physical places are destroyed? Constanza Macras talked to eyewitnesses who remember cities that no longer exist in the same form today. The actions in the piece refer to the ancient techniques of ars memoriae, whereby in order to recall the thing to be remembered, we first have to find and organise our impressions. At the heart of this mnemonic technique is spatial orientation: how do we use rooms and places to remember?
The piece is the result of a close collaboration with Swiss/Italian Oscar Bianchi, who composed music delving into collective and individual memory, and celebrates sound as a physical, sometime muscular, place.
The Past explores architectonic places as narrative instruments of our history: in the rewriting of it, for overcoming the wounds of the past, and for understanding contemporary events (personal and global) as part of a constant cycle.

Constanza Macras | DorkyPark
Constanza Macras, born in Buenos Aires, studied Dance and Fashion Design in her home town. After her further education in Dance at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York, she presented her first works in Amsterdam. She moved to Berlin in 1995, and founded her own dance company, Tamagotchi Y2K, in 1997; she created performances and pieces with artists from various fields. In 2003 she founded the dance theatre company Constanza Macras | DorkyPark in collaboration with the dramaturge Carmen Mehnert. Here she joined actors, dancers, musicians and artists from various genres and countries with performers that range from 4 to 72 years old, combining text, video, live music and dance. In 2008, Constanza Macras’ production Hell on Earth was awarded the Goethe-Institute’s prize for the best German piece. In 2010 she received the “Arts at MIT William L. Abramowitz Residency” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the German theatre prize “Der Faust” for Megalopolis.
Constanza Macras taught workshops and master classes at Berlin Universities and was invited to Korea, Japan, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the USA as a choreographer and teacher. Her company works with theatres such as the Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and the HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts Dresden on a regular basis.

“The sharpness of the performance lies in the picture: in the smoothly suspended fall of a dancer, the back and forth of some scenes. Applause for a good theater piece.”
Uwe Salzbrenner, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11.11.2014

“One can feel the sparkling of humor and the sprawl of phantasy in this company. Whatever they touch is molded so long, until the sense of it has twisted itself around its own axis. Such subversive undermining is one of the strengths of the Berlin-based choreographer Constanza Macras and her company DorkyPark.”
Katrin Bettina Müller, TAZ, 11.11.2014

“One is watching breathlessly, how all the discourses about the art of memory grow rampantly into threads. Threads, which skillfully and subtly lead to the essence, which is to give life to memories about events, which actually are not presentable.”
Berliner Zeitung, 28.11.2014      

Supported by Kulturstiftung des Bundes