united sorry

During the Belluard festival united sorry will roam the streets together with operasinger Erik Leidal and the musician Martin Siewert to make songs of encouragement. It will end with a concert.

Today i am back in vienna, starting to work again. I am writing a subsidy request for the city of vienna concerning performing on green spots in the city, i am writing and thinking about a subsidy request for a soundproject in a park in New York, together with Cilia Erens, then i am preparing the performance Propaganda which we will make in collaboration with the symptoms in Budapest,the rehearsals will start very soon,  then i am preparing a solo i will perform in two weeks in Amsterdam, becoming a mountain, and i am organizing rehearsal space and sleeping space in Brussel for me and Maria before we perform again at the end of the month in Antwerp, and still i am thinking of how to structure these discussion evenings among artists, supported by Danslab in The Hague, which will happen all the time when i am back in Holland, for one or two days. And then i am advising some people in Vienna, and visit there rehearsals,and i am in dialogue with Georg about our duet.

So the new year started in a turmoil of preparing different projects.  And i like it, i really do… Because when the rehearsals start is difficult to wander around in this way, i do now.

everyday i work on the solo, a mountain is a sexy monster, today i decided to work on my mind, to break patterns and structures in my life, what means to break a belief in continuity. from now on, i try to restart all the time my mind, and not to think about what i will do in the future, or  interpret my sensual experiences by what i know from the past.

robin, my friend from paris, is now at the foot of the mountain ,which i want to embody in my solo, arunachala, in the south of india. he just visited me in amsterdam, and i was astonished by the coincidence, when i discovered that his mother has a house there. how real can a phantasy become, i wonder. I know the mountain only by the books, and the pictures of the internet. to be continued.

First i hunted a deer, i became the the deer, i loved the hunter, we had a house in the forest, very close to the village, where i was born. The hunter slept in the cottage, the deer outside, between the trees. but a lot of times, they became one, the man and the deer, a figure, half human/half animal, like in a cave painting, of prehistoric times.

And one day  i closed my eyes, and i didn’t return to the forest of my youth, i flew over a green, tropical, flat landscape, with one mountain arising out of the plane, Arunchala, the domain of shiva mountain of male sexuality.its base is a static power at the pelvic floor of the world. I start to fall in love with all the devotees, who  who lay down  on soft  cushions, with soft bellies, and tender faces all around the mountain.

lately i had no desire to write something in this blog, or even i had no desire to update the website. Autumn makes me go inward, and since i want to make performances with no so many words anymore,  i lost this desire to communicate in words. I was always a person who liked to chat and unfortunately dominated the discussion by interrupting people’s talk, by thinking out loud. Now i feel ashamed when i think of these moments.

i am intrigued by the power of pure presence. How much can you communicate by only being present on and outside stage. And what does it mean to be present. You can be visible and audible in the eyes and ears of the others, but still they can have the feeling that you are not really present.

My practice at the moment is to get aware how present i am , in everything i do. And then the next question, who is this I, in this sentence I want to be present….

I let my head rest on a pillow

I close my eyes

I am tired

I am exhausted

I try to sleep

The world outside spins without me

harsh words, harsh verdicts, harsh opinions

I let my head rest on a pillow

I am awake, engaged, but not involved

My head rests on a pillow

I seem to be passive

but I am not

I start to turn the wheel into another direction

by having patience

by making my head passive

for a moment

my profession is to dance

so I shall dance

my wish is to love

so I shall love

my neighbours

who said this before?

Must we be proud of our background?

Why should we force others to dress in our backgrounds?

I don’t know

I don’t want to know,

for now,

patience,

no decisions

and certainly no opinions

The sun is shining on my face

Home alone, and slightly depressed. No , i am not depressed, i am in a mood that i don’t call friends, and that i make lists in my head of negative sides of me. And there are a lot, funny, i am 52, and still i discover things in myself that are obvious for others for a very long time.

making work, frightens me, at the moment, because i must dig in my shadow sides, to get somewhere more existential than only dreaming of a better future, the hope for an utopian way of being together has transformed into an self inquiry, where things go wrong  inside me.

I know that i always hated, or let’s say was intimidated by power play, hierarchy, being in a situation that you are dependent. I behave like a nomad, traveling everywhere, carefully watching that i don’t settle somewhere, where i must play a part in a closed system with defined positions.

i feel this nomad approach isn’t that challenging anymore as a way to feel free and independent. I am not free in my mind anymore, prejudices and misinterpretations keep me in a prison of feeling insecure, and not home with myself.

i feel on the verge of changing, transforming, already for a long time. the whispering snake becomes louder, the moon starts also to shine in daytime, i discover that my heart is still bleeding, when i start to pay attention to it,  how long can i wait answering the call from the other side, the call to embody the other, the other who knows by intuition, i know my dead lovers are with me, to comfort me, in my quest to come home with them How to integrate loss in my life? i am still struggling.

My mind doesn’t want to let go of this feeling of loss. It is time to go inward, with a knife, a sword, and some cleaning stuff to erase the dirt.

i am back in vienna, back to rehearse. Thursday we perform in Leipzig,  in a week we show something at the dance night in vienna, and this weekend  i will give a lecture ( performance) about creativity and the body in Burgenland, a rural area south of vienna.

But to be honest, i am not so much busy with these things, i am more busy with the political situation in Holland – we get a right wing government, who wants to create harsh laws against immigrants, i still am wondering about the status of my relationships, obsessed by how my mind is working, irritated by my laziness to get my body in action etc.

“Dancing through life” That’s a dutch expression for people, who have a light, happy perspective on how their life is going. They don’t stick to things, they just move on. My “dancing through life” is a little different, i decided to dance through life, what means that i want to surrender to my body, to how my body wants to move and where it wants to lead me to. My task is how to stay close to the body, without rationalizing it, conceptualizing it etc.

Since i decided not longer to take themes of my private life on stage, but bring my aesthetics of stage – about silence, ambiguity, and not believing in the psychology of things – into my private life, i have no longer an overview over my life. It can go everywhere. On stage there is no future, as now in my private life. the xtc of the now.

dance-xtc during a nice intimate party at the launching of the swedish dance history. marten spangberg spins…

European premiere of robert and maria, finally, in de Singel

sometimes i am in a flow of my work, i enjoy to work, i feel confident, in a way i am inspired to think, rethink, to invent, most of the time in such a period i am busy making a performance or I teach. In between, when there is not such a work, unfortunately we don’t perform so much,  i do the administration, prepare, do all the things i postponed, like  refreshing the website, there is still a lot of material of the last performances waiting…

but this kind of periods make me insecure, nervous, there is a lot of nervousness lately, i didn’t have have that for years, the last time when i was very nervous, i was really much in love with someone who couldn’t answer my love, and visiting him i did everything wrong, i knocked on the door of his neighbour instead of his door in the flat, i struggled with the nespresso-machine- i hate these kind of machines – i couldn’t listen to all what he said, because panic reigned in my head.

and now, i feel the same, but there is nothing to analyze, why that would happen. i just must observe.

when you are born as the youngest in the family, as I was – my brother and sister were five and six years older, it isn’t easy to get rid of the feeling that you must prove yourself. You still don’t belong to the world of the grown ups, the persons who are in the position to rule the world. You easily feel excluded, neglected, not listened to, and all your activities are somehow based on the desire to get respected as one of them. This desire seems to be insatiable. It is never enough.

Since i started to investigate the mechanics of power and politics, i look at  myself in that way, and i really don’t like it. But to go deeper, I must stop judging.