Sacks and Barba: A Constructed Dialogue on Memory

Here's something I've never tried here. This is a constructed dialogue between two thinkers who never actually had this exchange. Oliver Sacks was a physician, neurologist, and writer known for books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, where neurological case histories become vivid accounts of perception, identity, memory, and consciousness. His essay “Speak, Memory” is the source for the idea that memory is not a direct recording of experience. Sacks is not simply saying memory is “narrative.” More precisely, he suggests that memory is a neurological and imaginative reconstruction: partly sensory, partly affective, partly narrative, and often vulnerable to source confusion.

Eugenio Barba is a theatre director, performance researcher, founder of Odin Teatret, and founder of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. His essay “An Amulet Made of Memory: The Significance of Exercises in the Actor’s Dramaturgy” provides the second half of this conversation. Barba proposes that actor training creates hidden structures beneath performance: scores, subscores, rhythms, images, tensions, and body-memory. Exercises become something the actor carries, not to show, but to draw from.

Bringing Sacks and Barba together lets us think about memory from two directions. Sacks gives us memory as creative reconstruction. Barba gives us memory as embodied dramaturgy. One shows how recollection is unstable, sensory, imaginative, and revised. The other shows how memory can be trained into action, rhythm, score, subscore, and repeatable form. For the actor, the intersection is useful: memory is not simply a private archive of feeling. It is material that can be organized, scored, carried, disturbed, and reactivated in performance.

Sacks: We should begin by giving up the fantasy that memory is a recording. The mind does not replay the past. It rebuilds it. Each recollection is an act of making.

Barba: And the actor must make, too. But the actor cannot rely on feeling alone. Feeling is too vague. It slips away. The actor needs form.

Sacks: Form, yes. But form is already present in memory. When we remember, we arrange. We select an image, a sound, a cause, a sequence. We give experience a shape and call it truth.

Barba: For the actor, the question is what kind of truth can be carried into action. An exercise is useful because it teaches the body to remember through precision. It is repeated until it becomes more than movement.

Sacks: So memory is not stored only in the head.

Barba: No. It is distributed through the body. A rhythm, a way of breathing, a pressure in the spine, a relation between impulse and restraint. These become the actor’s hidden dramaturgy.

Sacks: You call that hidden structure the subscore.

Barba: Yes. It is not a secret explanation of the character. It may have nothing to do with psychology in the ordinary sense. It may be a song, an image, a rhythm, a tension. The spectator does not see it directly, but it gives life to what is visible.

Sacks: That interests me. In memory, too, the source can disappear while the image remains vivid. A person may carry a scene as if it were lived, even when it was inherited from a story, a letter, a photograph, a film. The memory still acts upon them.

Barba: Then you are describing the actor’s problem. The actor often works from inherited memory: text, myth, image, training, cultural pattern. None of these are “the real event,” yet they can generate real action.

Sacks: So the actor does not need memory to be accurate.

Barba: The actor needs memory to be active.

Sacks: That is the difference. Accuracy belongs to evidence. Activity belongs to performance.

Barba: And activity must be organized. A vague emotion will not do. The actor must reconstruct the complexity of emotion: sensation, evaluation, involuntary reaction, impulse, decision. Emotion is not a flood. It is a pattern.

Sacks: That matches what memory does. Memory is also patterned. It does not preserve experience whole. It assembles fragments into a usable structure.

Barba: Then the actor’s task is to make those fragments playable.

Sacks: A remembered room. Details that make a story told so often that it becomes personal.

Barba: An exercise repeated so often that it becomes instinct.

Sacks: But instinct here is made, not natural.

Barba: Exactly. Training creates an artificial, second nature. The actor repeats a score until the score becomes memory. Then that memory begins to act.

Sacks: So your “amulet made of memory” is not nostalgia.

Barba: No. It is something the actor carries. Not to display. To draw from. It is a compact source of energy.

Sacks: For me, memory is fluid because it changes. Like water, it takes the shape of whatever it's put into.

Barba: For me, memory is powerful because it can be changed into action. It's like the muscle under the skin of the performance.

Sacks: Then perhaps acting is something that exists between our two perspectives. It takes memory’s instability and gives it discipline; a direction.

Barba: But that direction is meaningless it it is purely physical. It needs the inner life that comes from your idea of assembled fragments.

Sacks: This would explain why emotional recall, taken too literally, can fail. The actor searches for a matching personal wound, as if the scene required private evidence.

Barba: Yes. Any scene needs behaviour. It needs a visible life supported by invisible organization. But this does not always map directly to what is in the scripted scene. It is often in tension with it.

Sacks: The actor does not reproduce the past, or even what is presently written on the page.

Barba: The actor never reproduces. That would reduce the work to mechanization. The actor constructs the conditions for presence.

Sacks: Memory supplies fragments.

Barba: Training gives them the structure to hold them.

Sacks: Imagination binds them.

Barba: Action puts them out, into the world.

Sacks: And the spectator?

Barba: The spectator receives complexity as life; never complete or fully justified through explanation.

Sacks: Then memory in acting is neither confession nor archive.

Barba: No. It's a sort of living effort. Like a footfaller trying to win a point or a plasterer finishing a wall, responding to the situation with their skills  It is dramaturgy.

Sacks: A living, active reconstruction.

Barba: A physical body remembering and becoming through action.