How We Forgot Here (And why don’t you go back where you came from?)
The Movement Project’s How We Forgot Here is an interdisciplinary performance about memory and migration that asks a lot of questions. How did we get here? Where are our ancestors from? What have we forgotten along the way?
Two days before opening, members of the cast answered one more question:
WHY DON’T YOU GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM?
Marika Schwandt: I’d love to! First, someone will need to be selected to choose the place that I’ll be going. Then they will need to make an arbitrary decision about where this place is. Then they will need to tell me.
Malinda Francis (docuvixen): But where am I from? Do I go back to Barbados that i grew up for part of my childhood, which ironically is the only place I am seen as Canadian. I am back in Toronto, why don’t I go back where I came from, Holland where my mother is from,…I wanted to go there for a bit but status is not possible without my mother… Where you are from is relative? Is it where your exist in the moment or, where your ancestors are from? Through my interactions with various Diasporic communities. I see that hope of recognition, that familiarity, they see bit of home. And are you from…? So I would re-ask, How do you think, I was able to be born here?
Gein Wong: Sure, can I charge my plane ticket on your credit card?
Ryan Symington: I don’t go back because I don’t know where I am from. I am adopted. I know I was born in Victoria, British Columbia and that my birth mother decided to give me up before I was even born. I was never raised on Vancouver Island because my adoptive parents were from the mainland. I have no real connection to Victoria but during my childhood, whenever I went to the island for swimming competitions or for leisurely visits, there would be a sense of familiarity and calm that wash over me. I always found great comfort while sitting on the deck of the ferries, travelling through the passageways of the islands. Over the past year, something has sparked my interest and I have had this overwhelming desire to search out my real mother and father. The only purpose of doing that is to see what my face really looks like. Everytime I look at myself in the mirror, I have trouble identifying with the image that I see. It’s a bizarre experience that is becoming even stranger as I get older.
Eva-Rose Tabobondung: I would, if I could go back in time and put myself back into my mother’s womb, and she in her’s and she in her’s and she in her’s…. until the beginning of existence. Maybe I would be myself in another life time before this time. But maybe not. Maybe I’d just be happy going back to the land that I came from where my ancestors lived freely off the land and in harmony with each other.
How We Forgot Here
March 22 – 28, 2010
$15 in advance at The Toronto Women’s Bookstore, $20 at the door.
Showtimes and full info available here.
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