united sorry

i didn’t work on the website for a long time.I didn’t put any activities on the site anymore. I didn’t want to write. I wanted to change my dialogue with you readers, whoever you are and wanted to find a new approach. And I don’t find any. And I use to much the word I

Space, inside and outside my body – becomes more and more important when i dance, when i think about dance, when i think.  the space who i share with others, becomes slowly my main interest, also a trick to escape my mind, which always want to find something personal to worry about.

can i provide a space for myself and others to exist in harmony with who we are. that’s a kind of dream/desire/hope.

i was at “Occupy Wallstreet” in New York and was overwhelmed by the open space of being together and the desire to discuss with everyone.

I read a lot of articles her in the states, about the middle class getting poor, and people who can’t afford to stay in their house, or can’t go to the dentist anymore, and at the same time i am spending a lot of money in restaurants and hotels, while traveling from one place to another.

how do i position myself in this, what is the function of my performances, lectures and giving workshops all over the world.

change is needed, and change start with ourselves. That’s what i learned and what i still believe. I feel, I must jeopardize the way i live now. Or at least i must confront my fears, which block me changing.

elisabeth, a teacher of the sndo died. I didn’t know her so well, when we first met as teachers at the sndo, she didn’t trust me that much, she thought i was too dominant, later she changed her opinion, or i change dmy behaviour. I invited her once at my house when a close communal friend stayed with me, and we had a very nice time together. I could say, now she is dead, i loved her, for who she was. She had a lot of struggles in her life, but she could be also very funny and laid back. she was my age, i think.

elisabeth  i wish you a lot of love, and i thank you for the life you shared with us.

Back in vienna, reading the latest texts of marten spangberg, called spangbergianism and for the first time i can read his texts, it is blog poetry, so i have fun with the way he writes, he writes as he talks, and i agree with a lot of descriptions of the field i work in,he is angry with everything and writes like an angry deleuze. when you want to be in power, in s world that institutionalizes power, it is hard to survive. and as a choreographer you want to have the power to present your work .

in the same time i am giving a workshop, while i am reading that giving a workshop is only about the desire to be loved….and something for mediocre artists who want to keep working…

well , here i am, mediocre as I can be in the eyes of many, and honestly, i struggle more that it is easier to (fall in) love, than to be loved… but that is another item…but it is true for me that there has to be a balance between making work and giving a workshop.

and i  question what is the difference for me, to be creative and to make art. and why i want to blur borders between the functions of me as a private person, as a teacher ,as a performer, and maker.

in moscow i had a great experience, being exhibited as a dirty bear, who get in trance by russian poetry. i more and more get the feeling that my work, -this time together with philipp grigorian, a theatre director from moscow- works the best when it comes down to only one or two ideas, executed with a strong belief in the consequences considering the form.

it was a durational piece, so at a certain moment my body and mind started to feel free within the rigid structure, and this freedom opened new desires to use the voice, to do as less as possible…

since two days i work in moscow, it feels like wild west, traveling in a car from one place to another, in the meantime making a performance in two weeks.

i will become a bear, of course, while looking back to my bear and deer stories in the blog archiv, i was amazed how young i looked a few years ago in comparison how i see myself now, is it my tiredness, doing to much projects, not having a real home to do nothing….

i hope the bear will help me to find peace, to go inside, perhaps even to go into hybernation, i think that will be a good idea.

daydreaming/ sleeping in the streets of moscow, where everyone says, look at me, i am rich, or look at me, i need money to survive.

The body is tired

The body is tired of itself

The body is tired of working

The body wants to do nothing

The body wants to cry

The body wants to cry in the arms of a possible lover

The body wants to  fall

nothing matters anymore to the body, only the wish to surrender to something that is beyond its control.

i am not my body.

I am in the train from amsterdam to brussels, I am going to work with pieter and eu kyung. I just spent a day with andre, whose birthday I missed one week ago. It’ spring, also in my heart.

Because I have hayfever, I sleep a lot at the moment, with the curtains closed, no direct sunlight in my eyes. my head is heavy, it feels as if I am constantly in a slumbering trance. It is not an unpleasant feeling, because it gives me the opportunity to take a rest, to reconsider my lfe, what I am doing.

I am thinking of the people in Japan, the people in Tunesia, Egypt, Lybia, all the other arab countries, I think of the difficulties to get things changed in such societies or at least to get power games transparent. I think about the people in Africa, Ivory Coast, I think about the right wing movement in Holland, the stigmatizing even the grandchildren of the immigrants. I think of the lowest class of workers in China who work their ass of.

And I think about my work, how my work can spread in the world, my ambitions to grow in life, my ambitions to discover love, friendship, sexuality, creativity.

The train stopped, we are in the middle of a field with yellow flowers, and we also can see a highway with a lot of traffic. It is a sunny monday morning somewhere in the south of Holland.

What can I do?

I can try to enjoy life, as a tribute to sebastian who died so early in his life. He is always with me, wherever I go.

I can open my senses, and let my ego dissolve in experiencing one moment after another moment.

I can try to be honest to all the people I meet.

I can try to be honest about my intentions, if I have any.

I can do all the things which appear on my path, and I can learn from it.

I want to learn.

That’s something which was always there, the wish to learn.

Not by reading books, but by living my life and observing it.

Nothing came easy in my life.

I don’t consider myself as a gay man, but I am mostly with men.

I am not trained as a dancer, but I started to make dance-solo’s,

I have a terrible dutch accent, but I am not ashamed to talk a foreign language in public spaces.

I feel I don’t know who I am, but I teach a lot people to be themselves when they dance and make work.

There is a lot of I in this text.

Too much I.

What helps me to survive this and get rid of my big ego, is my love for the people who died. People of the invisible world who support me to go on.

I can doubt about my behaviour towards all the people around me , but not about my belief in the positive energies of good intentions.

So I must discover what are good intentions.

jack smith

I bought the documentary of jack smith, one of my heroes of the performance scene in new york, from the seventies and eighties. It’s breath- taking to see how baroque his way of living was, how he couldn’t cope with the art market and at last how he survived in his own art. he still remained the little angry kid, neglected by his mother, who escaped in adoration of the world of the diva maria montes.

After the documentary flaming features, which became a huge selling product, managed by others – he never made something finished anymore, his performances always started much too late and his next movies were edited on the spot.

he seemed a very difficult guy, full of hate, and distrust to the society around him. his poverty, his loneliness, but still making work, inspire me a lot. how to stay honest to yourself, and not become dependent from the market, stays a challenging question, certainly in this time.

whalt whitman, alan ginsberg, jack smith, my big examples, all come from the united states, and between their lifes and their work was almost no difference, what blocks me for going there? lack of talent, lack of belief in the power of art, or am i already there, and i can’t accept it that this is what it is…

alan ginsberg

what i love to live and express in my work, i also want to express and live in my work. my work starts to become more the realm of the subconscious mind, celebrating the forces of sexuality, death and the imaginative mind. some people say, after seeing my last duet with georg that i am as a kid, or that i am anarchistic, so when they are right, there are some conclusions to make…

how to research and live as a kid and an anarchist my subconscious and imaginative mind, my sexuality, taking my fear away for death.

whalt whitman

i just didn’t doing anything, the whole morning, drinking coffee, listening to music, cleaning the apartment, where i am in,  listening to music, dancing around.

i am in  silence, and i am sad, really sad,very sad.

i think it is the tiredness, which gets space now, i have a tired body, travelled too much with early planes, but also i know that when i start to get  relaxed a first feeling of happiness and comfort suddenly can twist into a feeling of a overall sadness.

i am sad about the world, what happens everywhere, but also what happens in my life, i am sad about the loneliness of people, but also i feel my own loneliness, and the forgetting yourself by going on in life, by will power, ambition of fake dreams.

i discovered that i still want to be some-one, that i need still some attention, recognition, love…

photo: ash bulayev

it is very early in the morning, i arrived at the airport of Budapest almost two hours before my plane will leave to stockholm. I rehearsed propaganda with the Symptoms the last two days. I can’t see the performances themselves, because i must continue my teachings in Stockholm.

I feel a relief. The work is done, now the silence must take over.  The question was how to ask the performers a personal engagement with the actual political situation in Hungary without forcing them to say or do things, which they don’t believe as something that concerns them in their private life.

at the other hand, when you invite silence on stage as the main character to reflect the situation, you put yourself in a difficult situation as a director. How to let the silence appear as a healing power, without imposing it towards the performers as a rigid rule, to be still and silent in between the acts.

i start to understand how this silence can work. It only works, when you accept there is no other way out of a difficult situation, than being silent, waiting, sleeping, and being intimate with yourself or with close friends.

silence is to redraw from the fight for power.

silence hits you by surprise.

silence is the ultimate surrender, to trust, that things will change slowly when you are beyond fear and anger.

i am silent, it is out of my hands.

i am dancing with imre, who came to visit me in amsterdam to see the deer dance , the next day he went with me to the students of dasarts to jam with us, the picture is made by ash bulayev, who made a whole series of pictures of the week in dasarts, which i will start to show on this blog, because these pictures make me happy. i am not only happy  by the way ash made them, but also by what actually happened on these pictures.

at the moment i am in stockholm teaching in the afternoon, and in the morning and in the evening i am free to do whatever i want. I have a nice apartment, so in this free time i could do all the administrative work, which i postponed for weeks.

that’s the plan, but the reality is different. I discovered that i  only can teach at the  moment. the writing of invitations and applications, the sending back emails to people who are waiting, the scheduling dates and travels, it is all too much to do now at this moment.

because i just start teaching here in stockholm, i must be very present to get in touch with what is happening here. i am coaching the first year students to make solo’s, in a very short period of time…

I am still recovering from a lot of work. The fact that the premiere in budapest was received so badly by a great part of the audience, is okay for me. That’s the consequence of the work we made. But the fact, that i don’t know if the performers were also okay with it, makes it hard to let it go. This weekend i will go again to budapest and rehearse the piece for the second period of showings. So i can find out how it was for them and if they believe in it.  I am looking forward to see them again.

After Budapest i had a  great time, with the students of dasarts for a week, it was a very intensive week with a lot of energetic work to stay with ourselves meeting other people. After this i was rehearsing a week with george blaschke for our duet , which will premiere in ten days, this duet is very challenging for me to make and perform because of it deals with the intimacy between male friends. and i started with frans working on his solo.

so i did a lot and had no time so much time to digest.

In austria and holland spring was suddenly there, one time it was even 18 degrees, and now i am in the cold and even in the snow again.

i discover that things are changing within me, without me controling it,  i start to perceive my body differently. another notion of being in my body emerges in my mind. when i am in a closed space like this apartment, or even a cafe, i perceive that a second body , that belongs to me spreads throughout the room, so there is another imaginary body outside of my physical body, i imagine that my head is in the corner, my legs are floating towards the ceiling, it is strange that the body parts stay very concrete in my imagination, how they are spread isolated inthe space.

this imagination makes me totally quiet. it feels like a mind game, to keep my mind busy, but at the same time this imagination relaxes my real body totally.

when i put all the body parts back into my body, that are made of other materials, wood, gold, iron, and i feel a got a very spacious body; a gift from heaven.

i think:

i need to rest.

i need to love.

i need-not to be ashamed to love someone who isn’t able to love me in the same way

i need to connect again- with myself,  with radical self thought theories, that blow my mind before i can start again.

spring is waiting, like a rose butt.

I am still digesting my experience with the performance, which we made  in Budapest. I thought we made a beautiful, but tough performance, concerning propaganda and the political situation of being confronted by populist slogans. I warned the performers, that perhaps some people would walk away, bored by the slowing down of the manipulation of meaning, as i called it, that actually happened, but even more, the reactions afterwards were aggressive, people were offended, we had bad reviews- not all – and one critic even had the desire to come on stage and beat the performers. I was troubled, because of my position as a director. when i would be on stage with frans, and we had such reactions, we could easily deal with it,  now i felt that i lead the hungarian performers in a direction, they never experienced before.

i am looking for a state of being on stage, that doesn’t pretend more than it is. It looks as if the performers are hardly doing anything – and some of them still think they do nothing, since i asked them not to act in the way they always do – but when they are open, not afraid, and not sentimental, they can become beautiful in who they are in the moment of the doing. I always liked the best to see musicians or visual artists on stage, who could lose themselves in the act of doing, and i am try to find a same way of being with actors and dancers. I thought that would be a wonderful as an alternative to the propaganda machine where everyone pretend to be someone ( a trustworthy politician, a father of the nation).

And being in Hungary i was confronted with strict definitions of being masculine, i never felt so gay in my looking for a physical  tenderness and openness of presence. Beginning april they will perform again, and i am curious how it will be. I hope they still believe in it, they did a great job, and understand that it is not easy to change a theatre language to tell something different.

Fortunately i met some people who thought it was highly political what we did, and also necessary to show it in Hungary. And i met a beautiful poet, who started to become a political activist with his poetic imagination. Poetry will always escape censorship.

But now i am in Pinkafeld, a residency in Burgenland, to prepare a duet with Georg Blaschke. Now I am the one, to look for this open presence on stage, without trying to become special. In Budapest, one woman came to one of the actors and asked him if he got money for this being so normal….

The duet is about our friendship, it will investigate our desires towards each other in performing, our love, our irritations, about our being bi-sexual and straight outside stage, the anger of a limited masculinity is still cooking in my veins,  i am happy to do this small project. life goes on….