Mother Tongue: Dance and Memory, an Autobiographical Excavation

Abstract

This chapter originates in childhood memories: my parents social-dancing at weddings, bar-mitzvahs, parties. I remember how they moved and looked at each other, my mother’s tongue brushing her lips. It was thrilling, illicit, a spectacle hovering over the boundaries of public and private, inclusion and exclusion.

‘Mother Tongue’ continues my exploration, in writing and dance, of autobiography as performance, fiction, history, and critical lens. It investigates the overlaps of personal and cultural memory, individual narratives embedded in collective circumstances and beliefs; and the merging of embodied, textual, and mediated memory with imagination and desire. The chapter is informed by films from France, Argentina, Hungary, Japan, and Poland, and by scholarship in mediated memory, collective memory, and postmemory; everyday culture; narrative and autobiography theory; and reflections on contemporary dance practice. It looks at dance to generate and complicate autobiography: I excavate my past and join it with others’, write and dance myself into being, bring actual people (living and dead) into contact with those I know only as words on a page, and create a meta-fictional community, a history of imagination, a performance of mourning.