united sorry

Last week I was in the mountains of Austria, looking for locations for a performance with Theater in Bahnhof for the summer, now i see the palms outside of my window, they are a bit freezing, because it is also called here in montpellier, where i try to support a group of people who make a comedy musical.

This week i am troubled by how to make dance and songs about emotions, daily life, social life, being part of a group who makes theatre, believing in the work you make, staying honest to yourself within the mechanics of the market.so welcome to the world of the comedy musical.

The feeling of hurt seems fundamental for me to make work.

I can’t get rid of the outburst of my broken heart. Perhaps because I discovered that a broken heart is also an open heart. My heart wants to be open to face the audience to share some of the pains and desires of life.

I know, that to communicate these feelings of sadness I must enter the pain of my trauma’s of losing lovers, parents, friends again. Death is still not really my best friend.  I can’t smell the death in my life;  most of all I  smell the sweat of the fear of death around me.

A shaman taught me to transform any disturbing emotion into pure energy somewhere in my belly. She also taught me to die in my eyes.

Every work which I make, turns out to be a psychedelic experience for me; it always dresses itself in a transformative journey of the mind.

And now, I am here at the bottom of the ocean, missing you, thinking of you, dreaming of you.  I never let you go, the hard I tried. Although did I ever really try?

Is this my big ego trip, because you showed me how i could become someone who wants to enjoy his life and love  to the fullest… sexually?

window in st.marks church where we will perform in april.

I am in the airport, flying back to Europe. I met some people in New York who opened my heart, people to whom I start to feel very close.

And I still look to become intimate with Eros himself. I see him as a giant masculine force, rising above the landscape, a bit like the giant in the painting of Goya about war. I think I cultivate this image because I am a man myself. Acknowledging being a human being and a man makes my connections with others, myself and my work more grounded.

I can deal with situations better, when I redraw myself from a personal context, and see the others and myself as a part of the human species. It seems that from that perspective i can se better how people organize and live their lives.

The more I feel connected with being part of the human race, the more I get patient and am able to listen to what happens to the others. And then I hear myself disappear in a fragmented chain of words, actions, and facial expressions to answer back.

The ecstasy of being is a state of total awareness of the body and at the same time an opportunity of letting the self disappear. Not only on stage anymore, also in daily life.

i am in a constant training to learn about performing.

Today someone asked me during a panel discussion: can you erase the “I”? I answered, “I can”, with the emphasis on the “I”, as a kind of paradoxical joke. I should have said: “One can”.

This week I bumped into several people, who I wanted to see. Just by thinking of them, they appeared around the corner.

At the moment I am thinking of the ecstasy of space. The space grows in my head, the space grows in my body, and these spaces connect with the space around me. Instead of taking drugs myself, these spaces are intoxicated and they wipe me of the floor, I am floating.

I am floating towards your arms, I feel you are there, waiting for me and nothing is stopping me.

I live very close to the empire state building, I know a place where they have very, very good cafe. I go there almost everyday. I am thinking of the aesthetics in my work. I love a precise form of something that is blurry; something that generates a certain kind of emotion when you see it, but at the same time escapes every meaning or capacity to name it. How to make something that isn’t arbitrary but at the same time can’t be categorized as something that is deliberately chosen? So I must escape the know body language of daily behavior and the known language of dance. How to dance in a language that is interpreted as a kind of non-dance, but still communicates with the public.

Instead of following in the footsteps of Terpsichore I want to daydream about moving with Eros. I want to develop my own movement vocabulary through the perception of the five senses.

There is a lot of work to do.

And my question to Eros is also how to connect with the person you love, when desires, dreams, expectations and even ideologies about love changed. Eros accepts the discontinuation of live, we must to use the senses all the time as we use them for the first time and in between we must let go.

These are all words. But how to relate them to the practice of making work, of exploring love, of meeting the world, the town, old and friends.

going to avatar with rosane and maria in an i-max theatre

I met a man, who was quite young and nice So immediately I felt quite old and clumsy, I felt we could be soul mates with each other. For the good times and bad times. When i saw him, felt very close being with him, but i felt no physical attraction. I felt clearly a barrier between us, not only raised by my shyness, but certainly also by him, When I didn’t see him, i missed him physically. My body reacted strongly. I cultivated images about embracing him naked and i could predict what would happen when we would start hugging each other when we had no clothes on. But I never fantasized having sex with him and still I missed him.

This unfulfilled desire is an icon for New York. I feel a strong mixture of desires, longing to the other, and a dreamed reality among the people I meet here. They are all artists.

And this desire triggers of course my own love trauma. I discovered that the longing sometimes serves as the base for my work. I fell once in love with a poet, who didn’t want to become a poet. He was afraid for the life style of being an artist. By saying no to me, I became the poet.

As a poet, I want to reach my muse, over and over. The impossibility of being with him broke my heart, but the breaking of the heart was one of the first steps of feeling autonomous as an artist.

It was my rite of passage to become the person I am now, in the same way as the death of my father, functioned.

I love new york.

I enjoy myself being a singing leather daddy during the ending manifestation of spencer sweeney in the gavin brown’s enterprise gallery.  It was a rock opera, entitled TV Baby , done by a.r.e. weapons.

in the house of my friend there is a wall full of paintings. It is quite impressive, to see the different approaches of making art . Some paintings are abstract, a lot are figurative, some are made by professionals, others by friends. i wanted to make another kind of painting. I wanted emptiness. So i put all the paintings away and all the hooks, there was the wall, painted light blue. I wanted something more empty. I made a big hole in the wall, and the hole revealed the world outside. I saw the house of the neighbors, i saw the wind in the trees in the garden, i saw the floating river. And i thought, this is the emptiness, that i like, the emptiness that is full. and immediately i have a title: selfportrait of man with beard.

i decide to work with this approach towards making dance performances. but i wonder now: in which wall i can make a hole?

i am laying on bed, checking my emails, new york city is waiting, but i am slightly depressed, the only solution is to stand up, move a little, take a shower, but there is chewing gum inside my mind which wants to stick at this feeling of being disconnected with everything that surrounds me.

funny, i am making two pieces about sensual connection, but my senses are dumb, feel like out of order, the only thing i can think of now is the feeling of disconnection, a feeling of selfpity of not being at home with  the world around me. I know it is my character when i am in a state where a lot of things and desires didn’t work out yet, but it is also the jet lag, and it feels stupid to let myself sink in this mood,

so here i go, wake up robert, it’s another day to work on your pieces, to observe your capacity to connect, do something, even dance your feeling of disconnection for god sake….do something.

why is there always this feeling of loss in me, you should think that at a certain moment trauma’s are definitely over, aren’t they. i must live with this feeling of loss, i start to discover that this feeling of loss is a fear to stay alone and independent.

i am looking for a way to connect with people and the world which has nothing to do with dependency, despair, or looking for people who help you cleaning the mess and the dirt. I have to become my own father for the child which felt abused so many times.

and i must discover why i never satisfied by what i have?

i just finished a week rehearsing with frans and enjoy the coffee in cafe drechsler. we have found somethings which could belong to the new piece, but we still have no idea how to structure it.

I like to keep this feeling, because i want to develop the dramaturgy out of the material itself. Originally trained as a dramaturge, i have the need not to superimpose a structure on what we do, but listen to what we actually looking for by doing things

the question is what kind of dramaturgy connects with  floating through a mental landscape.

today i met myself  as a totally stressed person.

As i  woke up this morning  i discovered  that I spend  too much money without thinking when i am rehearsing. I promised myself to accept this, but also i promised myself to be a little more careful in the future.

Then Frans and I  rehearsing  for our new piece, we were trying different things, very spaced out,  but at a certain moment i became totally emotional and vulnerable. I was happy that it happened,  i felt very  fragile, the scene had opened my nerves.

Then i made the mistake to check my email instead of just relaxing and cooling down. I discovered that i have no place to stay  in new york the coming weekend, so suddenly i saw myself  emailing people as a madman who could help me to look for a space  and i even was checking the internet for cheap hotels.  lloking at the currency of the dollars. etc.

I felt quite agitated, because i knew i had to  stop soon and leave  the theatre because the technician wanted to close the building. I felt a little awkward because i already stayed so long, so i did my best to leave as fast as possible. i put of my training clothes, put on my normal clothes, and in a hurry i checked if i had all the keys, the two cellphones, the wallet at the moment i left the theatre.

I thought it became time to cool down, so I decided to walk home, . After ten minutes walking i decided to drink a chai latte in a coffee shop, where there is wifi  to surf on the net on a more relaxed way and there i discovered that my laptop - with the new hard disk - wasn’t in my bag anymore. I didn’t know if someone had stolen it when i was in the bakery. or if i had forgotten  it in the theatre, so i ran  back to the theatre and opened the building again, aan looked in the hall where we worked. so i was in a kind of panic, running around, when i didn’t see the laptop.

at a certain moment  i decided that there was nothing to do about it, and at that moment i saw the laptop on a chair. i was relieved,and finally walked home, still with this stressy feeling.

so drama really takes over in my daily life, and also outside the stage i become a kind of drama queen. i hope it is just a period in the process of rehearsing.

8h15 rue du l’ourcq

Death listens to the sound of the living, the second coffee tastes always better, a new creditcard keeps the code of the old one. On television poiticians justify their actions in harsh, populistic words,  too much joints in the night gvie a headache in the morning, the woman, who was a mother of three grown up children, died with panic in her eyes. What’s happening to me, she said, very astonished, as if she didn’t know by then that death entered her life to get her. She wasn’t ready to leave her life behind, because her whole life she couldn’t do the things she wanted to do, and she still wanted to do them, in japan they make a beatiful tea with rice in it, how many plants can stay in a living room, without making it a living jungle. At a certain moment they grow to big. Too much air for the lungs. Sometimes someone needs to dance.