"What did you remember?" they asked us.

I remember the color orange, its contrast against dark tree trunks -- bright felt collages and cocoons tied to trees.

I remember walking through woods with the audience, crisp air, evening sun, and two deer racing past us.

I realized then that the deer were performers, too.

As well as the birds.

Birds added notes to Laura First's song, "Bold Young Farmer," though I didn't notice them until she began singing. While her melody rose, the notes of birds in surrounding trees complemented, then moved octaves higher than her own.

I remember the song of a train, too -- Ommmmm -- humming underneath trombone, hand drums and guitar.

I remember thinking human beings are such strange creatures.

I remember remembering dressing up and playing in the woods when I was a little girl.

I remember felt-covered rocks with yarn dangling from them, which made me remember the rocks I used to collect and paint with nail polish with my neighbor.

This is the way memory works, connecting one image to the next, until finally a mosaic emerges with billions of tiny pieces -- one that is continually being built and reflected upon.

During the performance art show "Remember" last weekend, I was made aware, though not directly, of my own memory, as well as the memory a place holds, as if I were a map, a changing landscape, much like Shepherdstown.

"I am drawn to the artifacts of our past," choreographer Kitty Clark stated. "Growing up in an old house, finding old newspapers hidden in floorboards, walking through woods with meandering stone walls separating former farm fields, catching glimpses of building foundations obscured by years of fallen leaves -- these are rich moments, tangibly connecting me to the lives of those who came before me."

Clark, also the executive director of Goose Route Arts Collaborative, conceived of "Remember" with composer Cam Millar and visual artist Colleen Tracey.

While the performance art show was rehearsed by its five interpretive dancers as well as its musicians, much of it was improv, Clark said.

"The story is not linear," she told me. "It's a series of moving vignettes, very imaginistic and impressionistic."

Throughout the show, one dancer ran through the landscape, holding a long strip of orange material above her head. It rippled madly in the wind, and then she was gone.

"Fragments and threads of memory ... unravel into the landscape, are captured momentarily in dances, bright artistic visions and musical strains; then escape again," Tracey wrote in her artist statement. "They become part of the landscape they travel through," she continues. "As the memories fan out and are scattered ... the landscape becomes a giant loom ... Weaving ourselves into the landscape."

Stereo speakers had been placed throughout the nearby woods, and the audience heard random bits of Shepherdstown's early history as we walked along a path.

Oct. 9, 1847 -- the sound of a whip, followed by a horse neighing; barrels of apples sold, and one load of hickory wood -- 160 years ago, who and what was here, standing on this same ground? We hear the sound of someone chopping wood.

We continued walking, following a drummer's lead and occasionally stopping to experience one of the five performers, who would state a memory, incorporating interpretative dance.

"I remember walking through the woods on a cold afternoon," Clark told us. "Skating on a pond. Surrounded by trees."

She stared upward and freezes in place, then unfurls as we walk onward.

"I remember the yellow house with the white-trimmed windows," Ray Shaw said, resting his hand against a nearby tree, "and the tall oak with shiny green leaves."

A hollowed out tree bottom becomes a sacred space as Eva Olsson caringly places leaves and twigs in its center.

"I remember an abandoned barn," Tracey says. "I'm a perfect picture of myself."

For more information on the Goose Route Arts Collaborative, go to GooseRoute.org.

To see photos of "Remember," go to Flickr.com/photos/saintgallow/tags/remember/.