Peter Oldfield and I have been friends for many years. More than anyone I know, Peter defines a spiritually motivated man living a simple and elegant life. Peter has traveled the world as a tour guide, been an actor, art dealer, colorist, interior designer, entrepreneur, arts center host and is currently living at a beautiful retreat center in Hawaii.

World Memory Theatre is his brilliant and practical cultural gift to the world. I look forward to attending its opening in 2010. All that’s needed is a wise philanthropist or lover of the arts and/or culture to fund his magnificent vision.

By Peter Oldfield, Multicultural Visionary

It has been observed that one of the abiding characteristics displayed by people throughout history has been a steady curiosity to know ‘the others’ – the folk that live on the other side of the river, on the other side of the mountain, on the far side of the desert. How do they live? How are they different? How are they like us? We listen to and watch stories about them knowing that in them we may catch the essence, the pith of those ‘other’ folk.

In stories people everywhere ‘dress up’ their accumulated knowledge, their wisdom, both to entertain each other and as a valued legacy to pass on to future generations. In stories we find the common threads of our experience – the trials, the joys and the tragedies. Through their twists and turns, we tell each other what we think it is to be human.

Today, people of the world are connecting as never before, ushering in what was once unimaginable – the ‘global village’.  At last we are beginning to understand how we can become truly cultured and world-related human beings.

In hearing other peoples’ stories, in seeing their art, listening to their music, and in recognizing the shared archetypes and the parallel mythologies, we can find within ourselves the  common streams of relatedness that cover the whole breadth of human diversity

To enable the public to have this rich multicultural experience, the World Memory Theatre is being developed as a multimedia storytelling theater-in-the-round – featuring twelve rooms of interactive global folk art linked as a dodecagon under a single dome. Visitors can select any artifact from this meta-content learning environment to access the exhibit database, where parallel myths, woven through different folk cultures, are accompanied by music and imagery, narrated as cross-cultural stories that immerse the visitor in a chosen archetypal theme.

For a complete overview of the World Memory Theatre project visit the site by clicking on this link.

To support or keep up to date on the project’s development email Peter at admin@worldmemorytheatre.org.