united sorry

After holiday and doing nothing for two weeks, i had problems to start again working. Especially when i promised to write a european subsidy-request. Writing texts for stage i like, writing texts to explain yourself in a way they will think it is interesting enough to give you money is hell. people who are waiting get nervous when i don’t write, and that makes me nervous again, and feeling guilty etc.

But yesterday i felt good again, because we performed Lost in Space for the second time, this time in Graz at the opening-party of Theater im Bahnhof,  I am quite happy how it went, I think, we are there now to make  it a beautiful performance.It always takes a time to understand what it is what you want to make…

It is a pity that we live in a time, where a performance must be finished, the moment you present it for the first time, most of the time our performances develop by doing it in front of an audience.

This summer i met a lot of new people, i made a performance in the austrian mountains with actors i didn’t know before which we showed it in front of several mountain-huts, Frans and I started a project with a dance company in Budapest, and we did a workshop in Impulstanz. It always makes me feel good to meet new people. like to meet, to see how they work, and to show how we work, etc.

But now i am alone in my house in amsterdam, and people are waiting for texts…

In the meantime, i need space and time, to rethink how to react on what is happening now, everywhere in Europe, politically. In Holland for example a discussion about right and left suddenly emerges again, and in the mass media a right wing group of people with harsh voices celebrate their new victory.

I can think of making a ritual again as in the time after nine/eleven, when i made the ritual Tower of Babel together with Lidy, and our last performance Lost in Space deals with the question how to get a political perspective on what we do on stage. But i feel that is not enough.

it is an exciting time, theatre becomes necessary again….

premiere party of  Theater Mundwerk Graz, the day after i performed with Theater im Bahnhof in Weissenbach. I stayed to see them,  a children performance that played with  bad taste and incorrect thinking in puppet format.

My mother died eight years ago. Since a few days I started to dream about her. This time, I was back in the house where I lived as a child. We had a little shop. It was in the middle of the night. I stepped out of bed, went down to the shop, because I knew my mother would be there, in case some clients still needed some beer. I wanted to replace her, so she could go to bed. I found her on a little chair, in her nightgown. We talked a bit, till I discovered that it was almost dawn. So I understood that she had sat there all night. I was shocked and immediately commanded her to go to sleep. I felt an enormous pity for her, having such a poor life. I was angry, but she said, robert you know, in two years your father will stop working and I can enjoy life. I felt that we both knew that it was too late then. I was angry because of her dedication to this role of being a victim of life. At that moment I loved her so much and I hated to feel so much pity for her.

Than I woke up.

united sorry will make with the theatre and dance company The Symptoms (Tünet Együttes) a musical about the politics of daily life. it will be a celebration of humanity, tenderness, complexity and ambiguity in a time period where politicians use propaganda strategies of simplify reality in one liners. the premiere will be at the Trafo festival, at the Trafo House of Contemporary Arts.

Robert will work two weeks with the russian dancer and choreographer Olga Dukhovnaya to make something together in an exchange, organised by Brut between viennese based and moscow based artists.

my good friend lost her partner last night, i lit two candles for them, for him to make the big journey into nothingness, for her to live on, with the living memory of love in her heart.

I just bought a new laptop, so my analogue period of carrying two notebooks around seems to be over. Although i will keep them and still want to use them, for short notes, and beginning drafts.

this week i am in amsterdam, performing keeping still with anne teresa, my part is indeed an exact interpretation of keeping still and every morning after having performed or rehearsed i feel totally relaxed when i wake up.

In the daytime i am writing texts for the piece in the mountains with Theater im Bahnhof. I want to write with the stillness of a mountain, i keep a stone  next to me, which i got as a birthday present next to me, and my aim is how to find words that generate stillness and silence, and not a bubbling mind, or a flow of thoughts.

so stillness is my theme these days. So I still continue investigating eros and silence, i don’t want to  escape it…

the weather outside is beautiful. the sun reflects on the water,there is a slight wind and  it is warm but not hot. i am quite happy being here, writing down these words, installing my laptop again.

happy with my new laptop, but even more with the world how it  manifests itself to me today.

last week my bag was stolen  in the train to bruxelles. so i lost my laptop, all my personal notebooks, traintickets for the next day, etc. it was one day before my birthday and i decided to see it as a new beginning. i decided to start a analogue life again and bought two new notebooks, one for work, other for private thoughts. of course there is hardly a difference between what i write in these two notebooks. because what is a private life, when you are constantly travelling fom one city to another city.

now i am in graz, working on a project in the mountains. my investigation is the human connection with nature, so, the closest i can get to nature myself,  is to observe my connection with my own body and mind. but who is this I which refers  to the word “my” in “my connection with my own body and mind”. is this notion of I not a part of nature itself, i wonder. i think that everything that manifests itself in the material and the immaterial way is a manifestation of how nature functions. so  i start to think that my search for connection becomes a getting rid of a strong notion of  the I as an isolated entity towards the notion of nature.

in my collaboration with the actors of Theater im Bahnhof i must work of diminishing this notion of I, this strategy i already investgated in my duet with Maria Hassabi. How to be present in the body and at the same time become a vanishing point of the I, who seperates itself from the other.

in an ecstatic mood, where everything is experienced as one, there is no need for connection.So am i working on an ecstatic performance and shall “I” cope with the xtc of silence in this project. I do hope so. i feel ready, to face the mountains.

i am in Leipzig, to give a workshop, So i am back in the town, where i made already three different theatre pieces.  I started to know the place very well,  it feels like coming home in a way, but  something changed, and i discover that it is the way i see it. I discovered that I changed.  I am older, of course, but i feel as if something important happened with me in the meantime.

I have no idea what. Only that my attitude to my body changed, and as a consequence of this my attitude to my work and how my work is appreciated changed. I am in peace with what i do, and i trust that it will find its resonance, without me pushing or questioning it.

“love will finds its way” was a song which  i used for a project with prisoners, a long time ago, but now i want to change this song in “life will find its way”. It is hardly me to decide, where life brings me. Th eslogan “listening is a political act” starts with my private life.

the cafe of the theatre where i work, today there is a meeting of the left wing politicians in leipzig, there is free sekt, and three musicians of south america. the politicians don’t applaud, hardly listen to the songs, they drink their free sekt, and talk, they act as if they are very animated ( after a few drinks).  i ask myself why they asked the musicians to play. It is beautiful music.

i am here in the middle of nowhere, a place in the german country site, that is very silent, no sound of  traffic, no sounds of airplanes.

i just finished the first three performances of  ”lost in space”with Frans. I have a lot of questions about how to go on with this project.  It feels like we hit a break through into a different kind of making theatre, without being able to acknowledge the consequences of what we do at this moment. Time to digest things.

I get interested more and more in a very specific quality of performing. I want to investigate how i can use the body and the mind as an instrument, that is going to speak by itself towards the audience. When we place this instrument in a very specific situation , it will find the melody by itself. So when the mind get in tune with the environment, it will dictate  different sensitivities of  how our bodies can communicate with an audience.

It is like catching the weather conditions around us.

When i am serious in finding a non hierarchal way to be part of the world and the earth, i must find a same way to approach my own mind and my own body. The body is the most closest we can get in our relationship with nature, and at the same time our (observing) mind is also an inherent part of the nature.

at a residcncy in bröllin, somewhere north of berlin, total silence, large buildings, very cold

i premiered two days ago with Frans, and tonight is our last show in brut, vienna. I am excited, fully awake, not so much patience to sleep, i sleep only four five hours now, it is always nice to discover what a piece can become, when you do it for the first time for a public. Your body get thrilled, and your mind start to investigate all the details, which still can be added, or left behind, how to condense something, more going to a certain minimal form. only in front of the eyes of a public you can sharpen the form you proposed.

In noticed that for this piece, i want to eat a lot as a preparation, i think of fish, meat, big salads, a lot of alcohol afterwards, what made me laugh, because for the piece with maria two weeks ago in new york i tried to stop eating on the days of the performances. i wanted to be as empty and open as possible. And here i have the desire to have a certain grounded belly on stage, or something, i have no idea, why this difference. It amuses me that you never know where a piece takes you, and what it demands at the end, in imagination, physical preparation, the day you perform.

both pieces deal with putting your body and mind in a strict structure, and finding ways to let the body speak in a very intimate , not pushing way. It is a lot about how emerging details in the body can provoke different emotional and mental affects in the space, without controlling them. It is for sure how two bodies relate to each other and it is clear that my friendship with maria takes me to other planes than the friendship with frans.

it would be nice to show them sometimes together, but let first look how many theaters will be interested to show them. We didn’t promote them very actively, i wanted to wait till the premiere , because i want to change the way we produce and sell the pieces nowadays, i like the idea that we can travel with performances several years,  i like the slow peace of it, to let things grow by themselves.

i get interested by the idea of gardening. What to do, let things grow. I think this will be perhaps  a new inspiration to make  work. When i come back to vienna, i want to look if there is a garden somewhere in the surroudings of the city where we can make a performance and gardening through the seasons at the same time.

but even this idea must ripe a little…