It cannot be denied that, collective or ensemble memory is a most important cultural part of a community. From a social cognitive point of view, the network can play a crucial role in understanding the world environment and human communication. It was a main question for me that "why my people understand some modern artistic works of local arts groups deeper than others, especially in physical theater field?". And the question lead me to the importance of collective or ensemble memory in creative artistic process.
I assumed that designing and producing a performance based on collective memory (in my world, collective gesture memory) in a creative process help us to have a deeper connection with our audience. For instance, I produced a short dance based on the Islamic prayer (Namaz and Vodhu) titled Kariznew that was performed in Attakkalari Biennial 2011 in Bangalore and in Bandar Abbas 2012; however, in our Islamic culture dance is a reprehensible phenomenon. Our local audience found the forms, rhythms and movements as a familiar phenomenon; however, they did not sure about the origin of the forms and movements.
In my opinion, understanding and receiving the world or in other word "sensory perception" is cultural based; and collective gesture memory is a big part of the perception process. Therefore, by considering the elements of the collective gesture memory we can produce and design artistic projects with deeper communication between performers and audience.
I presented the conceptual framework in PSI th20 in 2014 in Shanghai Theater Academy.
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