Back to the Present. New Version

Memory is fragile, garbage lasts forever.

In 2003, Constanza Macras and her company DorkyPark created the legendary piece Back to the Present, which premiered in the abandoned Jandorf department store in Mitte and then toured the world. Now, after more than 20 years, Back to the Present is back!

With Back to the Present Constanza Macras goes for a journey into the Past. Where do you go when you don’t want to deal with the past or the future?

Jill Emerson, the iconic performer from DorkyPark’s earlier works, is back in the show, surrounded by all-new cast members. The characters find themselves in a casting of a reality show after a love break up. They try to be themselves absolute originals and at the same time become archetypes for a mass audience. Fetishized objects of former relationships accumulate like debris under a mountain of rubble.

How do you recycle the stuff that never decomposes, like love letters, flags, old props, old ideas? As history becomes increasingly digital, what is the difference between storage and memory?

Back to the Present lives in a sort of limbo between the layers of its own history.  It will be leaving behind uniforms and costumes, old props and programs, video recordings, broken and useless pieces of the set. Extend this further, the debris of past relationships: Torn cinema tickets, old phone numbers, love letters, cards from Valentine’s Day.

Jill moved on, but somehow decided to come back to where she thinks it all started: Back to the Present.