Forgotten Futures – Memories, Maps and Movement An Applied Theatre Project in Dementia Care

The role of applied theatre practitioners, as active agents working within the contemporary, neoliberal city poses particular challenges for established practices, necessitating a reconsideration of the role of arts intervention in the city. Forgotten Futures – Memories, Maps and Movementis an arts intervention project conducted in nursing homes in Liverpool city, where people living with dementia tell their stories (both reminiscent and imaginative) about their relationship with the city of Liverpool. The project explores themes of place, identity, maps, and how the movement of people - the diaspora in particular - colour the fabric of any given city and ask bigger questions about patterns and placing of people globally. The project explores the art of cartography and how the brain reflects the intricacies of map making. The architecture of the city and the architecture of the mind are juxtapositioned and thus explored through movement and storytelling. The city is seen as a blueprint, a topography, a map – reviving, disrupting and making memories. This paper seeks to connect discourses of urban exploration, ruin theory (Dobraszczyk 2017), and pseudo-public spaces (Garrett 2015) with the pressing need to locate the person living with dementia within the fabric of city life. The argument will critique heritage culture, gentrification, neoliberal agendas and the demise of principles of openness and collective action, as a result of the ongoing erasure of public spaces. It also problematises influential views of dementia as irredeemable loss, characterised by irreversible entropic processes