“Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like” was a two-night Zoom performance conceived, written and performed in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. From Mike’s current apartment and Iris’s childhood home, we asked audiences to expand their conceptions of self and place through a single question: What from your childhood have you been looking for, since then?

“Madeleines” sought to utilize the limitations of digitally mediated performance in a time of social distance and immobility to chronicle the expanses of our and our audiences’ interior lives, moving through a complex exchange around memory, desire, and the allure of what might have been.

We also sought to create a sense of intimate expanse between ourselves as performers, between ourselves and our viewers, and between ourselves, the city we call home, our childhood homes, and the places and people we visited as children. Using pre-recorded video and audio, live selfies, direct address, and dialogue, we interwove the Proustian stories of Mike’s search for a Singaporean dessert from 1997 and Iris’s longing for an embodied feeling from 1994, noting the small kindnesses strangers and the natural world showed us on our separate, but interconnected quests.