united sorry

I am stuck in New York, while Frans is rehearsing alone in the space we rented in Vienna, to prepare our premiere of next week. Luckily i got a ticket to hamburg, and then to Munich, for tomorrow, so i can go by train to vienna, and still have some time with frans, before we enter the theatre.

i am really lost in space, my body is exhausted after the premiere with Maria, i am too tired to do anything, to go to a museum, to read a book, to visit friends, i am just staring around, without getting fascinated by something, i am a kind of floating, dreaming with open eyes, but it is a dream that is blurry, unfocused, jet lagged, without having travelled by plane.

it seems to be the ideal mind state to prepare for our new piece “lost in space”, but i can’t even concentrate on that.  i feel liek fading away, like a brush in the air, no eye, no ear, no form , no shape, nothing.

today i was questioning what art is. Is art really this artificial  universe where one person dictates how everything looks, sounds. Is it the task of the artist to control all these choices  or is it his task to find a structure or task, or concept that allow  invisible forces ( of interpretation, sensation, perception) to come, without being manipulated by the artist himself.

Suddenly i was thinking that art for me is more  an attitude than a product, a mentality to be present among people, in every situation. So it is not the product that counts, but the mentality behind. In that sense i am still dealing with our performance “feminine delight” where the ideology of modern and post modern thinking became more important for me, than the actual steps or movements.

For me, it is the being, the presence that generates the composition, not the doing, or the chosing, it is the listening of the being. i get closer to my investigation in the meaning of pure presence on stage.

I just finsihed a week rehearsing with Frans in vienna. Tomorrow i will fly to New York to work with Maria, the premiere is in two weeks.

It is spring, today on easter sunday i downloaded the messiah of Handel, because I want to stay in tune with the seasons, and at the same time  i was  reflecting why i want to work so hard, or let say why i decided to make three pieces in a row, although i have a lot of pleasure doing it. But there are no free days anymore.

I am rehearsing with maria in pa-f, the residency, initiated by Jan Ritsema in the north of france. we rehearsed a lot, but outside the rehearsals i was listening to the St. Matthew Passion of Sebastian Bach. Easter is coming, the winter dies, spring is in the air.
It means that we can have a breakfast in the sun, and late in the afternoon a storm arises with heavy rainfalls.

I did my own passage through winter into the hope of spring. I said goodbye, or let’s say reflected the things i lost, or i want to lose and i welcomed the things i want to flourish. Having a nomadic life, being a lot alone in a room at night, helps a lot to clear to analyze thoughts and feelings, false belief-systems.

once i want to dance  the St. Matthew Passion in a public space, but i think i must practice more, so let’s wait ten years…

my traveldeer, a cup of coffee, and a cup of tea accompany me in the middle of the night, to rethink winter, and dance my own version of the rite of spring on the passion of christ.How intimate can one become with his own phantasies.

Last week I was in the mountains of Austria, looking for locations for a performance with Theater in Bahnhof for the summer, now i see the palms outside of my window, they are a bit freezing, because it is also called here in montpellier, where i try to support a group of people who make a comedy musical.

This week i am troubled by how to make dance and songs about emotions, daily life, social life, being part of a group who makes theatre, believing in the work you make, staying honest to yourself within the mechanics of the market.so welcome to the world of the comedy musical.

The feeling of hurt seems fundamental for me to make work.

I can’t get rid of the outburst of my broken heart. Perhaps because I discovered that a broken heart is also an open heart. My heart wants to be open to face the audience to share some of the pains and desires of life.

I know, that to communicate these feelings of sadness I must enter the pain of my trauma’s of losing lovers, parents, friends again. Death is still not really my best friend.  I can’t smell the death in my life;  most of all I  smell the sweat of the fear of death around me.

A shaman taught me to transform any disturbing emotion into pure energy somewhere in my belly. She also taught me to die in my eyes.

Every work which I make, turns out to be a psychedelic experience for me; it always dresses itself in a transformative journey of the mind.

And now, I am here at the bottom of the ocean, missing you, thinking of you, dreaming of you.  I never let you go, the hard I tried. Although did I ever really try?

Is this my big ego trip, because you showed me how i could become someone who wants to enjoy his life and love  to the fullest… sexually?

window in st.marks church where we will perform in april.

I am in the airport, flying back to Europe. I met some people in New York who opened my heart, people to whom I start to feel very close.

And I still look to become intimate with Eros himself. I see him as a giant masculine force, rising above the landscape, a bit like the giant in the painting of Goya about war. I think I cultivate this image because I am a man myself. Acknowledging being a human being and a man makes my connections with others, myself and my work more grounded.

I can deal with situations better, when I redraw myself from a personal context, and see the others and myself as a part of the human species. It seems that from that perspective i can se better how people organize and live their lives.

The more I feel connected with being part of the human race, the more I get patient and am able to listen to what happens to the others. And then I hear myself disappear in a fragmented chain of words, actions, and facial expressions to answer back.

The ecstasy of being is a state of total awareness of the body and at the same time an opportunity of letting the self disappear. Not only on stage anymore, also in daily life.

i am in a constant training to learn about performing.

Today someone asked me during a panel discussion: can you erase the “I”? I answered, “I can”, with the emphasis on the “I”, as a kind of paradoxical joke. I should have said: “One can”.

This week I bumped into several people, who I wanted to see. Just by thinking of them, they appeared around the corner.

At the moment I am thinking of the ecstasy of space. The space grows in my head, the space grows in my body, and these spaces connect with the space around me. Instead of taking drugs myself, these spaces are intoxicated and they wipe me of the floor, I am floating.

I am floating towards your arms, I feel you are there, waiting for me and nothing is stopping me.

I live very close to the empire state building, I know a place where they have very, very good cafe. I go there almost everyday. I am thinking of the aesthetics in my work. I love a precise form of something that is blurry; something that generates a certain kind of emotion when you see it, but at the same time escapes every meaning or capacity to name it. How to make something that isn’t arbitrary but at the same time can’t be categorized as something that is deliberately chosen? So I must escape the know body language of daily behavior and the known language of dance. How to dance in a language that is interpreted as a kind of non-dance, but still communicates with the public.

Instead of following in the footsteps of Terpsichore I want to daydream about moving with Eros. I want to develop my own movement vocabulary through the perception of the five senses.

There is a lot of work to do.

And my question to Eros is also how to connect with the person you love, when desires, dreams, expectations and even ideologies about love changed. Eros accepts the discontinuation of live, we must to use the senses all the time as we use them for the first time and in between we must let go.

These are all words. But how to relate them to the practice of making work, of exploring love, of meeting the world, the town, old and friends.

going to avatar with rosane and maria in an i-max theatre

I met a man, who was quite young and nice So immediately I felt quite old and clumsy, I felt we could be soul mates with each other. For the good times and bad times. When i saw him, felt very close being with him, but i felt no physical attraction. I felt clearly a barrier between us, not only raised by my shyness, but certainly also by him, When I didn’t see him, i missed him physically. My body reacted strongly. I cultivated images about embracing him naked and i could predict what would happen when we would start hugging each other when we had no clothes on. But I never fantasized having sex with him and still I missed him.

This unfulfilled desire is an icon for New York. I feel a strong mixture of desires, longing to the other, and a dreamed reality among the people I meet here. They are all artists.

And this desire triggers of course my own love trauma. I discovered that the longing sometimes serves as the base for my work. I fell once in love with a poet, who didn’t want to become a poet. He was afraid for the life style of being an artist. By saying no to me, I became the poet.

As a poet, I want to reach my muse, over and over. The impossibility of being with him broke my heart, but the breaking of the heart was one of the first steps of feeling autonomous as an artist.

It was my rite of passage to become the person I am now, in the same way as the death of my father, functioned.

I love new york.

I enjoy myself being a singing leather daddy during the ending manifestation of spencer sweeney in the gavin brown’s enterprise gallery.  It was a rock opera, entitled TV Baby , done by a.r.e. weapons.

in the house of my friend there is a wall full of paintings. It is quite impressive, to see the different approaches of making art . Some paintings are abstract, a lot are figurative, some are made by professionals, others by friends. i wanted to make another kind of painting. I wanted emptiness. So i put all the paintings away and all the hooks, there was the wall, painted light blue. I wanted something more empty. I made a big hole in the wall, and the hole revealed the world outside. I saw the house of the neighbors, i saw the wind in the trees in the garden, i saw the floating river. And i thought, this is the emptiness, that i like, the emptiness that is full. and immediately i have a title: selfportrait of man with beard.

i decide to work with this approach towards making dance performances. but i wonder now: in which wall i can make a hole?