Memory Rings
Opening Night: November 17, 2016
Closing: November 20, 2016
Theater: BAM Harvey Theater
Five-thousand years of environmental change unfold beneath the boughs of the world’s oldest living tree in this phantasmagoric mix of puppetry, choreography, music, and macabre fairy tales from Phantom Limb Company (69 ̊S., 2011 Next Wave). In a dark wood filled with tech-savvy forest creatures and humans navigating an increasingly Googleable world, a series of surreal wordless vignettes unfolds. Marionettes and masked performers channel fragments from Gilgamesh, Snow White, and other tales, resulting in a poetic and enchanted mirror of our hubris and hope that illuminates the long history of humanity’s place in nature, with and without nurture.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
November 18, 2016
Memory is notoriously unreliable, so I am hoping that mine quickly expunges any recollection of “Memory Rings,” an obscure, whimsy-sprinkled dance-theater work about, well, I’m not sure what. Trees, basically, and maybe why we should all hug them before they fall to the forces of human depredation. The production, which can be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Sunday, comes from the Phantom Limb Company, and is part of a trilogy about “environmental concerns,” according to a program note from Jessica Grindstaff, who conceived the work with Erik Sanko and is credited with direction and design, as well. Mr. Sanko also provided the puppets. Unless you read that note before the show starts, you will probably not know that the production was partly inspired by the legend of Gilgamesh, an ancient king who, according to Sumerian legend, “sets off to achieve eternal renown by slaying the god of the cedar forest.” Who knew cedar forests had gods?
READ THE REVIEW