The author is searching for the theatrical unit of meaning exploring the way Simon McBurney builds up the performance in Mnemonic, a Complicite Theatre production created for the 1999 Salzburg Festival. Inspired by headdriven phrase structure grammar and Chinese pictograms, the paper looks for verbs and actions that define a matrix, where each element determines the complex theatrical sign. Any change of one single sign-element causes the meaning of the whole to change.