THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET’S ROMEO & JULIET
Recently landed: Love is Not Blind
Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Romeo & Juliet, presented as part of their 2020 Digital Season, for Fjord Review.
Memory is not linear. Have I told you this before? I saw this production of see Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet, filmed on Wednesday 21st September, 2011 at Arts Centre Melbourne with Orchestra Victoria, before I wrote my first piece for Fjord Review.
Memory tells me I saw this very version, starring Madeleine Eastoe as Juliet and Kevin Jackson as Romeo, from row H in the State Theatre as it was filmed. But memory is porous and subjective. My memory also tells me my primary school teacher took our grade 1 class to see KISS perform a special matinee. Have I told you this before?
Beyond a band name being a reference to a kiss between “a pair of star-cross’d lovers,” my memory of KISS has little to do with Romeo & Juliet and everything to do with it, for our memories are not giant archives to leaf through, but associative and unfixed. Each time we recall a memory, it alters to accommodate new information we have since received. And as we lay down new memories, we rewrite them to fit with our own understanding of them. Our ability to reconfigure our memories is not a fault, but a means for future creative growth; just as Aristotle described, our memories are less archives of our lives, more tools for the imagination.
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14th of May, 2020
Madeleine Eastoe and Kevin Jackson in Romeo & Juliet, 2011 (image credit: Jeff Busby)
