united sorry

it is seven years ago that my father died, and i decided to stop curating theatre and i made the step of only making performances by my own. now i am in mexico, for the first time in my life, a little out of space, and i am happy that i have some time of, before the conference starts here.

Already a long time i was thinking that i must redefine what i do. and now i take some time to reflect about life and work. I found out that this was necassary, because i discovered i become more and more shy on stage. That is for me a sign, that i must reposition myself to what i am doing. In the performance in graz and also in paris, i strated with a very personal text. personal in the sense that the assoicationsgive by the words , immediately seem to give acces to my disturbed inner emotional life. And i felt naked, more naked than i would dance naked i think.

i want to reveal what is inside to show deeper how a consciousness works. In this particular insight i hope to show something more universal, i show myself as part of the whole, with my desires and fears.

but i feel somehow that i am ending a certain period in my life, but which one, the nomad life.

yes, i give my self a nice time of.

so i am exhausted, after a show in fondation cartier, a conference at the sndo, and a brief encounter with eagle ager in new york. it is time to rest, but also to rethink what i do everywhere and nowhere.

because we do now a lot of in short period made pieces, i learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work. And i also discover that i get shy to confront the public with material which is really fresh. I like this autistic state when i see other performers, but i don’t like it when i see myself doing it.

yesterday evening i was really happy to learn that what we do never is isolated form the world outside, from the trees outside the buidling, the noise of the street, the sound of the house music on the other side of the street. and i learned that i love to dance, when martin plays his guitar, and we both don’t know where it will lead us, but we inform each other where we are heading. with frans and martin i found two guys with whom i can feel free. With Frans it is about sharing the same mental state of making something together, of looking at each other, to give space to each others phantasy. With Martin it is about finding the same sensitivity, the  to deepen the atmosphere which emerges and brings it to a deep emotional state. Probably we will work all three together in this semi-improvised setting at the leopold museum in Vienna, in a space with the paintings of egon schiele.

i like to dance, it brings me to a state of tenderness or violence. It is nice to find a tender of violent timing in the body, in your own perception of space. And i like to write. By writing i want to reveal the subconscious, not only of myself, but also of my culture, our society. In what kind of world do i live, as a nomadic artist, travelling form one city to another.

Everywhere i meet nice people, people with an open mind, or an open face, or a open heart, or a combination of all this, but i feel reluctant to really get in dialogue, because i am a traveller.

yes, i easily can fall in love, in every city, i think my work is a lot about falling in love. Falling in love with an idea, with a work of art, with seing my colleagues.

And now, i am just exhausted, sitting in a cafe in paris, where they have wifi, so after one week of being of line, i can do some administration

.

it is one o’clock , and i drink a white wine, to convince myself, that it is holiday

yesterday we discovered that the city of vienna doesn’t give us money for one year. A theatre in vienna proposed us to ask this kind of subvention. So we will stay very freelance next year, following the path where the opportunities are. It is always hard to hear a no, but i stay happy as (the korean shaman) Hiah Park told me to do, the morning before.

i am now in leipzig, for the local premiere of die Box, just before i was for a few days in Graz, to check out if i could work with actors/friends of Theater im Bahnhof. So i am suddenly in involved in text theatre, learning to write more and more in german.

Something changed, inside me, as always. For days i felt that i had already died. I was aware of my skeleton in my body as if i was a character of a bad horror movie, and a lot of things happened to me as if they happened to some-one else. Not a bad feeling, on the contrary, i felt very inspired by this alienation of life.

yesterday i said goodbye to Ali in a cafe, very close to the station in Vienna, because he would go by night train to Berlin, and there I met a friend of him, a beautiful person, who i checked later on you tube, reading his own poetry in galleries. I was immediately inspired by the direct speech of this man, and couldn’t sleep. The talk i had with hiah park about making work without wanting to define a form, and his very concentrated personal way of presenting poems came together in a desire to change my approach to work. I want to present txts and movements as wild and formless as they can be, a an uncensored communication channel of the soul, direct , without shame, totally in the moment. I must work a lot, to find my own style in this , but i got already some ideas… Spring is still in the air and i must use it.

In Paris i discovered by accident - i had a ticket for the Calder exhibition, and the same ticket also gave entrace to a big Kandinsky overview- that i liked a lot the paintings of the last period of Kandinsky. I bought a card of one of them. And ten days later i stayed in a hotelroom in Graz with a poster of a painting out from the same period.

a half day of in paris, means to get very cultural, i went to the calder exhibition in pompidou, i already read about it in a dutch newspaper, and i was curious to his circus puppets, and the film which was made of his playing with these puppets. it was funny, touching and brought me easily in a happy mood. but there was also a kandinsky exhibition, and because the ticket is for every exhibition i entered. I was not really interested, and thought well lets check out all these famous paintings, i had to study when i studied russian and russian art. i saw the russian period, the bauhaus period, and i wasn’t really concentrated. i recognized what i learned, blablabla, i was tired of walking all day and than it suddenly happened,  like calder made amazing work after he visited the atelier of mondriaan, in the same way kandinsky changed his work, moving to paris and meeting miro. i was shocked and touched, his paintings with little organisms, morphic forms, his circles into black, it opened my heart, i saw again the full coloured manifestation of the life energy as i’ve seen in my ayuasca visions. happy shiny forms, small details, small organic forms, it made my day.  and now i thought how to end the day. I could go to a gay sauna - to relax! - or go to the holy mountain of jederowsky, a movie i like to see already for a long time,  i only saw some fragments on the internet, so  i decided to do more culture, and go to the cinema… no sweat, no watching men hunting each other, but go for some psycho-magic entertainment.

is this my new life?

i am in Paris, preparing five projects in the same time, and to be honest i like it. I really feel confident about everything in the future. A dangerous feeling, but perhaps it is just the start of the spring, what makes me like this. i have the feeling i can start again, with new energy, new ideas, and instead of imagining my work as a tree that grows, i suddenly see my work as grass, a landscape of grass, which you hardly see growing, but it grows all the time. where does this idea of growth come from? why do people , and certainly i , always have this desire that we our growing, that our live isn’t in a stagnation. After the piece in leipzig, something changed in my mind, the process of dying seems to be out of my system, i died already so many times on stage, and now suddenly i want to flourish, play, show a lot of different colours, energies, contrasts, life energy as pure as it can be.

i bought in vienna the catalogue of paul thek, but immediately gave it to a dear friend, who reminds me a lot of him, then i was in amsterdam, but the catalogue was sold out totally, i heard the book was 20 euro’s more expensive than in vienna, than i went to the centre pompidou bookstore, i stood thrity minutes in line to get into the building, then they had only one item, the clients item to watch it, so it was already in a bad condition, but i bought it, because i already started reading it in vienna, and it was now thrity euro’s more expensive than in vienna. but i am happy reading it now.

thirty minutes on line in a starbucks coffeeshop, just to check the necessary emails, my back starts to hurt of carrying the laptop to everywhere, i will go to the calder exhibition now, and enjoy an afternoon of.

i am in Berlin now, recovering from too much work, the premiere went well, very well, i was astonished how nice it can be to direct actors, th epublic reacted very warmly, everything looked okay, and then afterwards i fell in this black hole, and i am wondering, if i can function in this system of a stadstheater, in a system where you are one of the twnety, where everyone is tired, and where a premiere is a common thing and the next day you are already ready for another thing.

i fled to berlin, to have a day off, to rethink why i am in this business, and if this kind of work is something for me to continue. It is difficult to close doors, and to say, i can’t do this kind fo theatre productions anymore, also when I really like making this kind of work. but i finished working in the theatre in amsterdam, to make my own conditions, and suddenly i am in the middle of this theatremachine again, with people forgetting to do things, people not really willing to collaborate, people not thinking about how it is to make work etc. i wrote a long letter to give a voice to my frustration, we will see.

i am in the middle of this process, to make work in a context of living, loving and working and how this approach survive when i surrender to a system where they define this living, loving and working so differently.

i was this weekend in Bautzen, at a festival of puppet and object theatre and i discovered that i look like the directors of this puppet companies there. They are a little older, but also have a grey beard, and a belly. so i found my peers… in an outer corner of germany close to the border of poland and the tsjech republic. i felt good with them and the differents in esthetics and ethics made our meeting inspiring for everyone, i hope. my work brings me to very specific places.

i was thinking of the bearded artistic men in Brooklyn, new york, and how their life seems to be so different from the bearded theatre directors in the area of Bautzen. As a nomad I learn that everywhere there are nice people to meet, with and without beard.

the comment on the piece was that people couldn’t get grip on it, that it always escaped their interpretation in comical and sadness, in parody and honesty. It is the same reaction i get when i work with Frans.

elisabeth, as one of the artist twins, together with Tobias she reprsents the androgyn representation of the soul of the artist who seduces chris ( the technician, the representative of humankind)   to become a shaman.

working as a director, well it brings me to unexpected places. for instance when people come to watch a run and i can’t do nothing, only witnessing how the cators are doing their best.i almost fell in the trap, that i wanted to become a very good director of monologues- i really wnat to learn this- and forgot what the initial idea of the whole project was, to make something which combines my esthetics and ideas with the craftmanship of the performers of leipzig.

do not act, i told them so often, and i think , it is strange to say to actors don’t act so much, but still i do, because i like people a lot when they are on stage, without hiding themsleves in the doing. strange that a certain way of undercooled film acting becomes more and more an authentic way of performer instead of theatre acting.

a very nice, and inspiring director saw a run saturday , and told me a lot of things, which made me think how to go on, becaus eit was clear it was still not ready, and we only have one week, and even not four days together, and then i went to the sauna, and asked myself what do you want with this piece, and when i was thinking about this, it immediately made me happy again, because i don’t want to make an immediately working piece, but i want to investigate the mentality in which we work, this so called living-loving and working - and how this mentality cna be shared or mirrored by the others. so i changed my attitude, and thought i must work more how i would with work with myself when i would make a piece, and act(!) less as a director who must know it all to convince the others…

today we did a new version, and i was allready more satisfied….

and i am really looking forward to go on and have this week premiere, life can be beautiful, the more you stay with yourself…

playing the fashionable artist, in my lonely room in leipzig

i returned to leipzig to continue working on this theatrepiece. I discovered i like it a lot, to direct, to witness how the actors find their way in finding the right timing, sometimes i feel like a conductor, who  proposes a kind of musical composition in time and space, and the actors must find a kind of natural behavior towards what i ask them to do. Strange how emotions and content are so connected with rythm, with different volumes of the voice, and certain kind of allowing or avoiding the silence to come in. The three actors are all totally different, and it is very niceto get in dialogue with these differences.

in the same time i am totally aware of the esotheric dimension of what i ask them to do, and the presence of sebastian, or let’s say my memroies of his death, and the longing to be with him afterwards becomes more and more tangible.

dear sebastian, i still love you, but after this peice i let you go and you can stay in the realm of the death, when you want. with this piece, i say farewell to you, and thank you that you came into my life.

lieber sebastian

you dance inside my heart

where no one see you

but sometimes i do

and that sight makes our art

you always wanted to become my brother in my shamanistic actions

and now you are

we work together

i am here, you at the other side

but don’t feel obliged to do it,

only do it, if you wish

my wish is, that you are happy, with who you became now….

big hug, robert

this time i was only for an evening in amsterdam, to see work of friends, and now i am in vienna to perform something small, but new. So my mind is full, and very tired, and this time i forgot my electric toothbrush and the adapter for the computer, i decided to buy a new one, which happened to be expensive, and allthough i always said i don’t care about money, i fell in a bad mood. How to accept this art of forgeting.

a lot of working, i love the actors, but there is not so much other living in between the rehearsals in leipzig. In four weeks, we make a piece, and we write the texts ourselves…

Without forcing it, it becomes a very personal story , about how i struggled with the death of loved ones.  And also i again raise the question if  you can sublimate life by making art…the actors are great and for the first time i feel totally at home here. the piece will re-enact a death ritual, inspired by the power presence of a woman as the Korean shaman Hiah Park and the glamour of the Fashiondesigner Marc Jacobs.

In between i am preparing a conference for the school,  learn some text for the performance saturday in Vienna and take the courage to sell the work of me and frans or find residencies. I am in a good mood, but sometimes a little anxious that i could become hyper by doing too much and lose contact with the world outside. I never cook for myself, always have breakfast, lunch and dinner in a cafe, and the whole time my mind is working.

What i miss the most, is the physical contact with another person. Of course I touch the actors whenever i can…-:) , but i am afraid that that annoys them a little, when it becomes to obvious a cry for intimacy. But i allready see that it becomes a very physical and sensual piece.

since it becomes spring time, i aks myself why did i choose to become a theatre nomad travelling to everywhere, investigating love on stage, without having any opportunity to practice it outside the theatre. it makes me laugh, this contradiction. yes robert, there is so much love and friendship around you and your other half looks at you from heaven, remember,  why still longing for new adventures…. it is good to laugh about yourself, spring definitely has arrived.

spring time in cafe lindex, the dramaturge comes to ask if the next version of the script must be printed again, everyday sometimes changes, and the question is , do we think of the trees or of our own comfort, today the answer is comfort, so there will be no misunderstandings in the rehearsal space…