I forgot

In I forgot, the Russian theatre maker Oxana Sankova confronts the pain of her youth. It hurts her just to think about it: the place she ran away from, the place she has always been ashamed of, the place she has never let anyone see. She dreams about it almost every night. Although she always hated her home, she felt broken when everything around it was destroyed. The curved, wooden world. The little courtyards. The secret corners and the holes in the fences.

“We lived in a kind of basement with a window at eye level. Outside the window there was a little garden. Tiny, actually. Five cherry trees, some raspberries, chokeberries and strawberries. But for me it was like a big, magical world. I especially looked at it at night. I slept with the curtains open because I was afraid of the dark. The garden was surrounded by a wooden fence that often fell down. I was ashamed that our fence was always falling down. I was ashamed that of all the wooden houses, ours was the ugliest. And that we lived in a basement. My childhood world was demolished to make way for a luxury concrete monster. But my poor, tumbledown house is still there, like a shameful stain on the elitist surroundings.”

Oxana Sankova grew up in the Russian city of Samara and gained her acting diploma from GITIS, the Moscow theatre academy, in 2002. After an acting career spanning almost 15 years, she opted for a radical change of course and went to study directing at the RITCS in Brussels. I forgot was her graduation piece from her Bachelor’s degree in 2019. Now she is presenting this show at nona. You can also see her in De dieren by l’hommmm on 19 November.