OUBLIEZ - Whom we forget
How do we change perspectives when things and people become strangers to us? The performance OUBLIEZ - WHO(N) WE FORGET focuses on the 'in-between spaces' where communication takes place - between those affected, care staff and relatives - and tries to capture what happens to people who "disappear without being lost".
Master's Project of the Master's Programme Applied Theatre by Dominik Jellen
16 & 17 September 2022 at 7:30 pm
ARGEkultur Salzburg
The 'dementia problem' has long since arrived in our social discourses. At the moment, the percentage of people worldwide who are actually affected by dementia is just under 20%. According to current estimates, 115,000 to 130,000 people in Austria live with one of the different forms of dementia (as of 2020).
Due to the continuous increase in the age of the population, this number is predicted to double by 2050. Dementia - a diagnosis that changes everything for those affected and their relatives. Accepting the disease seems just as difficult as dealing with it appropriately. But perhaps it is much more about empathy than understanding? The term is derived from the Latin demens 'unreasonable' (lacking 'reason', 'thinking power' or 'prudence') and can be translated as 'diminishing power of reason'. It brackets about 50 different diseases, the main feature of which is a deterioration of several cognitive abilities compared to the previous state. It can result from various degenerative and non-degenerative diseases of the brain.
Conversations with relatives who have experienced different phases of this disease tell the story: from the fresh arrival of a life partner of decades - in the generation of our grandparents or parents - to the gradual loss, to being overwhelmed, to misunderstanding this phase of life, to the death of the person affected. These biographies, which are never repeated from person to person because each person affected draws on individual memories, are the starting point of this collective research. We experience people with forgetfulness as peculiar beings in their very specific worlds, with very specific patterns of movement and a physicality that we often cannot understand from the outside.
That there is a constructive side to deficits and that even a disease such as dementia, which is considered incurable, can have nuances that underpin life in its incomparability and make it worth living - for all of us - even in very advanced states of illness.
for all of us - we experience together through stories of you and me. With humour and silence and sound and
Performance
Anna Russegger, Regina Weixelbaum, Jordina Milla & Shady Greis
Dramaturgy
Felicitas Biller
Set design
Nina Vasilchenko
Concept & direction
Dominik Jellen
