Camillo '93 : Rieks Swarte's Memory Theatre

Abstract

The Theatre of Memory or the Mystery of the Lost Secret was a performance created by Dutch theatre maker Rieks Swarte in 1993. With a title reminiscent of a boys’ novel, the title of the performance matches the sense of adventure with which the then young and upcoming all-male team engaged in this ambitious project. The team did extensive research into the history of the Ars Memoria, made their own reconstruction of Camillo's memory theatre, trained themselves in mnemonic techniques and even used part of their project funding to take a trip to Venice where they studied Camillo's treatise L'Idea del Teatro (1550) in appropriate surroundings.

The Theatre of Memory (1993) is best understood as an example of what Swarte calls his ‘lecture performances’. Uniting all these performances is Swarte's playful way of relating the display of objects and images to the narration of scientific history. Both in science and in art, Swarte recognizes the urge to put things in to an order. As he has said, ‘Every art form is always also concerned with the arrangement of data.’ Swarte's interest in Giulio Camillo's theatre of memory is therefore hardly a surprise.

Looking back at this performance after almost two decades, the imaginative experiment of the reconstruction of Camillo's memory theatre maintains its appeal. Although communication of Camillo's ideas to a contemporary audience was problematic, a closer look at Swarte's performance provides a surprising perspective on the meaning of Camillo on the brink of the computer era.

Notes

¹ The original title (in Dutch) of the performance was Het Theater van het Geheugen of het Mysterie van het Verloren Geheim. The English titles of all performances that I mention in this article are my translations. None of these performances have been performed in any language other than Dutch.

² The acting cast of the performance consisted of Rieks Swarte, Guy Cassiers, Sjoerd Wagenaar and Ferdi Janssen. At the time of writing this article, Rieks Swarte is still the artistic director of Firma Rieks Swarte, Guy Cassiers is the artistic director of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Sjoerd Wagenaar is the artistic director of the site-specific Dutch theatre company PeerGrouP and Ferdi Janssen remains active as a freelance actor.

³ The Tempest (De Storm) was made by Firma Rieks Swarte in collaboration with De Toneelmakerij and was awarded the Wijnberg ScenografiePrijs 2011 by the Dutch Theatre Institute (Theater Instituut Nederland [TIN]).

⁴ ‘Lecture performances’ is my translation of what Swarte terms (in Dutch) ‘college voorstellingen’.

⁵ The original Dutch title was Het Cabinet voor Natuur en Kunst (1987).

⁶ The original Dutch title was Het Museum van het Toeval (1992).

⁷ The Panorama of the Century (Het Panorama van de Eeuw, 1999) was staged on a small island named Forteiland IJmuiden.

⁸ Word (Woord) was presented as part of the Cordoba festival in 2004. The festival thematized the flowering of European Islam in Spain around the year 1000.

⁹ This is a quote from my 12 January 2012 interview with Rieks Swarte. All other quotes by Swarte in this article come from the same interview.

¹⁰ The way in which informative and participative elements are mixed in this performance, as a means to introduce the spectator to the art of memory, closely resembles the structure of the recent bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein, in which Joshua Foer wittily intertwines the main events from the timeline of the art of memory with an account of his own training in mnemonic techniques when he was attempting to win the USA Memory Championship.

¹¹ This scene is available on YouTube as theater vh geheugen scene 1.wmv (2009).

¹² For a more elaborate description of the symbolic meanings that have been assigned to the architecture of Camillo's theatre and its images, see (for example) the article by Peter Matussek in this issue of Performance Research.

¹³ The scene that demonstrates the reconstructed theatre is available on YouTube as theater van het geheugen scene 2.wmv (2009).

¹⁴ For example, see William Uricchio's article in this issue of Performance Research about the use of location-based digital technologies to explore urban space.