100 Steps: Working on Memory

Questioning an attitude towards what is remembered can help to develop practice in surprising ways. During the process of creating the text for his new work, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Evan Webber undertook an evaluation of his own relationship to his biographical, “true” subject matter. Why did he think it important to represent what happened in the way that he remembered it? Some of his research—Socrates via Kierkegaard, Joseph Jacotot via Jacques Rancière—led him to draw a connection between his attitude towards the factual and the in-egalitarian structure of theatre itself. He outlines some of the benefits, both practical and imaginary, of this questioning.