united sorry

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.

10h47, rue de l’ourcq

First there was a a lot of fog, then the sun appeared, cars on the highway became visible, the windows of the other houses made a composition of empty holes.  Some people try to excel in their work by sending a nice email to their working partners. Coffee is made from coffeebeans, they travelled a long way before they gave taste to some hot water.

how can you find a kind of timing towards movement that generates a certain kind of beauty? A specific timing that isolates the body from the space, and at the same time  makes the space around the body tangible . Such a timing can make you aware of your own percpetion of this all, because you se something magical, mysterious. And ofcourse that’s what i am looking for…

I explore this kind of timing in making a distinction between the rythm of my mind and the rythm of my body. It is never artificial, never totally organic how i move. the movements are alterneating, shifting, in between these two states. Art is to find another organization in nature, than we know, by lettng the capicities of our mind, intermingle with the capaicities of our body. In the mind we can free ourselves from the rythm of the body, but we don’t want to dominate our body by mental control, so at the same time the mind can listen to how the body reacts, interacts. We need a lot of awarenes.  Awareness is something different than mind control, awareness also observes the actions of the mind.

yesterday i walked on the pilgramgasse in vienna, very close to my home, and i was thinking about the conceptualists in oru dance practice. they consider themselves as the highest level in art, because they consider the inteligence of the mind as dominant above the expressionim of the bpdy. But a next development is to intermingle the intellignce of the mind with that of the body. Because art isn’t about knowing, its a constant flux between discovering and testing unknown areas.

i am happy, i fly to paris tonight.

Three years ago they found you dead. And again i feel this enormous sadness about you not being alive anymore. I find it hard to accept that you made your life  so short, that you couldn’t find peace with being the person you were.

you were such a beautiful person.

i still want to hold you like we did so many times, just to express that it was and still is okay to be with you. Dead or alive, you stay in my mind as my little brother in crime. In crime to be loved. Endlessly.  yes, sometimes i start to forget you, but I still love you deeply.

I just told gerog, that i was once in a club with you, there was almost no one there, but the music was great. I was dancing, you were drinking at the bar. I forgot you totally i was while moving, and then you crossed the dancefloor and kissed me on my mouth and said, i love you so much because of the way you are dancing now. There was nothing seductive or sexual in what you said, it was just that we became soulbrothers at that moment, because  you recognized something in me, what i didnt know before.

Once you asked me if we would do a lot of shamistic travels together. At that time i didn’t understand that you became one of my travelcompanions through the country of the death.

sebastian, wherever you are at this moment, i wish you all my love… and send also my love  to all the people who still miss you

today i told frans that i like the music of scott matthew so much, but that i was a little disturbed by the 81 posing pictures with him and his beard. He is nice to see, but that is a little to vain, and the moment i saif it , i thought of all my pictures on the blog, by the way Frans was smiling to me. So i decided to disappear from the screen.

This morning, when i was looking for a old disk, i discovered my old german book about magic, with this book i can learn how to disappear, not only from the screen, but more out of my body. I already stopped drinking alcohol, so i can start to practice again… where does the magic of the theatre stop?

enjoying a party in a viennese apartment

saturday i saw a dance performance which irritated me so much, that i couldn’t applaude. Perhaps i was the only one who saw what i saw. I saw a female body on stage that was so anorectic that she couldn’t relax in her dancing. The mind of an anorectic person has a control issue, he or she wants to control the body, and a person who wants to control his or her body, can’t let the dance happen to emerge, he or she wants to control the dance, and a person who wants to control the dance, can never get a real connection with the dance. so i heared some beatuful music, but i saw a woman who could not dance on it. It seemed that her fight to be in time with the music was the main topic of her dancing. And i saw a man on stage, who behaved as the  inventor of this all, but at the same time he played the role of a humble man who can’t reach the madness of his muse. She already lives in another world.

I read that the performance was inspired by un chien andalou of bunuel, one of my favourite movies, but i couldn’t see any of Bunuels radical narrative surrealism in what they did.

What can I say? These kind of performances exist, and they have nothing to do with the things i like in contemporary dance. I think dance doen’t have to be a fight about control, i prefer a dialogue between the knowledge of the skills and the choice of letting something unknown emerge. Virtuosity of movement is about allowing the body to enter a state of freedom in dancing, it shouldnt be  about a fight to impress the public. Dance becomes magical when the dance moves the dancer, not when the dancer works hard to keep in control of his or her movements.

After seeing this performance, i was happy that i want to make another kind of dance-performances, with another kind of intention, curiosity and ideology.

Sometimes it is good to see art, which you really don’t accept, to keep convinced about the necessity of your own ambitions.

i will do a very old solo about silence and the death of my father within two weeks. now six years later, i still want to be in silence a lot, on stage , and outside stage. but something changed, my comprehension of what silence is , becomes more profound. people always laughed when i said them that i like silence so much, because i can’t stop talking when i move on stage. but since mexcio, the research in danslab/den haag and my discovery of Eros, the silence has become a sensual experience. Silence isn’t an absence of sounds, it is a deepening of listening what already exist, in me, in the other, in the landscapes around me.

i looked as trehearsals of georg, heide and me, and i was touched by our bodies in stillness, we became very human, just by resting in our bodies, and not controling the movements which emerged from this silence. i am happy to work on this silence with frans in our new piece, to rework my martha graham part in front of the mirror, and to start the work with maria. But even i think it will influnece my performance with latifa and my humble shadow appearance with anne teresa.

silence is accepting the being a body.