Trace Memory is a 30-minute performance given at night in a cave. ... Visitors wait at the bottom of a candle-lit path, offering a memory of their own in silence or out loud while Austin goes ahead to the cave. After a while, they climb the hill and duck down into the cave.

A smoky fire is burning at the cave mouth, but the chamber is still quite cold. Visitors sit along the granite walls ... which are bare, or painted with sheets and drips and figures in bright, simple colors. The cave floor is surprisingly level. There are candles to see by, and assorted objects including a tape player and small speakers on natural ledges.

Austin sits in the cave's far end, wearing a mask, and soon she and the tape machine begin to speak about the cave, about things germane to the cave — the geology of the Upper Connecticut River Valley, for example — and the curiously level floor, as well as of things not obviously relevant, including her life in the house down the hill and a summer night when she could not sleep, and of presences historical, emotional, and supernatural. She and her taped voices, in constantly interrupted narrative and informational flow, trace geological and personal factual and fictional memory....

Trace Memory is an environment of sensation and language both found — like the cave itself — and contrived, where meaning is artfully discovered and revealed.

Trace Memory was conceived in collaboration with Eakins, a fiction writer who lives in New York City. Both artists have contributed research to the medical, geographical and geological data enriching Trace Memory, but the essence of the collaboration seems to be a reciprocal power to inspire through narration. An Eakins story, Powers in Opposite Parts, is incorporated in Trace Memory's many-sourced text; Powers in Opposite Parts uses memories of Austin's.

The result of this narrative cross-pollination is a layered story, a metafiction that is at once ghost story, Ice Age travelogue, domestic memoir and matter-of-fact seance. There are moments — deliberate and delicious collisions of language — when the overlapping [live and taped] voices... deliver the kind of poetry that might be assembled from torn-up scraps of The Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Kiwanis Camper's Guide to the Presidential Range. The piece's dead-serious delivery doesn't suppress its authors' obvious delight in words and wordplay, the teasing power of narrative and the juxtapositonal essence of poetic imagery.

These are many words to say that Trace Memory is a privilege and a gift, a performance artwork of rare import, pleasure and unpretension.

When the first primitive human put on a mask to dance around the campfire and imitate the animals of that region, wasn’t that performance art? When the first storyteller wove dream images and words together for an audience, wasn’t that performance art? And when the first shaman created objects and a ... script for a ritual healing, wasn’t that too, in a sense, performance art? ...

The performance piece “Trace Memory” is about to begin. ... First, there is an admission fee. ... You must touch a small roundish stone and leave a memory ... [The] trail ... leads up to a wooded hill, to a small cave. ... Your instructions are to enter ... below the painted triangle. [Elizabeth Austin] will meet you there. ... Behind the dark mask, her eyes are bright, the whites illuminated by the many candles lit throughout the cave. But in the dark green iris there is a look ... like a hunger, like a wolf. ...

[The] interior of the cave is painted. Contemporary images, perhaps what Frank Stella would have contributed if he had been one of the painters in the caves of Lascaux 18,000 years ago. After many moments of uneasy silence [Austin] says, “I, not I, tell his, not his story.” And the tale begins.

There are many layers to this drama. ... The layers are like the sedimentary stripes of different earths that are seen when the landscape is cut open. The layers are like the pages of the world’s history as they stack up on one another. The layers are like all the personal quirks, habits and stories acquired throughout a lifetime that add up to a whole human being. ... There are many voices; they are all her voices, enhanced by complicated recording technology. They seem to come from different locations in the cave; they echo down the narrow shaft, off the granite walls. Water drips from the fissures in the enamel-painted stone. ...

As the 30 minutes passes, you begin to understand how the history, geography, archaeology and dream/vision fit together. ...

[Outside], the moon is full and bright. The tall, narrow trees surrounding the mouth of the cave are silhouettes against the faded indigo sky. The hairs on the back of your neck riffle slightly. There’s a chill in the air as you return to the path and eventually pass the touch stone. You’re reminded of the Japanese tradition of placing a stone bound in rope at the entrance of a tea garden. It’s there to warn the visitor that they are about to enter a different world. ... You know you are leaving with a memory to equal the ... one you gave.

An ancient sprite, face and frock painted with bold primary colors, sits cross-legged in a cave on a New Hampshire hillside. Flickering candles illuminate the walls and ceiling, painted the same bright yellow, deep red and brilliant blue as the visage. Several silhouettes of human forms seem to alternately emerge and recede from the rock while sounds seem to resonate from within the stone. The inclusive effect is of suddenly finding oneself in a primitive world, as though the mists of our collective memory had somehow dissipated. ... As the moon slides across the evening sky, a story is told. ... The tale ... occurs all in the middle, rather than having the traditional beginning, middle and end. And when it is over we awaken to that other dream we call the present.