united sorry

For the first time, since weeks, I have an evening home, although it is not even my own home, I am in an apartment of a French choreographer, somewhere in the suburbs of Paris. I just had a couscous with halal sausages in a restaurant around the corner. I feel happy, after doing some emails I postponed a long time. I have muscle pain, caused by my daily rehearsals with Latifa, and I enjoy it.
At the moment work gives me a lot of pleasure, first working as a performer in Paris, then for a week working in the mountains in Austria, to make something with people who became friends. It gave me the opportunity to wake up every day at six to walk in nature, even in the snow, then performing a small thing in Leipzig and deejaying and now again back in Paris. First I was slightly depressed when I arrived in Paris, I was too tired, didn’t sleep enough, I doubted about this lifestyle, but now just only rehearsing with Latifa in the daytime, I have time again for myself, to reflect, to rest, to dream etc.

I am thinking a lot about psycho magical rituals in theatre. How can the actions you do in art, change the mind and heart of yourself and/or your public. What makes an act magical, in the sense that by doing an act you put a different energy in the world, because this act communicates direct with the subconscious of yourself or the public. The last week, I tried to integrate this in two of my performances. The nice thing that it is strictly personal, and that I didn’t bother the others with it.

In the big group piece about Maria Theresia I experimented with the magic of situations in which family and art could be integrated. It was my equivalence for a more human perspective of politics, when the work is rooted in the same strategies as private life, the strategies of love, intimacy and protection of each other. Maria Theresia was a group experiment, to discover if you can create from a source of friendship and intimacy, also when you don’t know the people before.

In the mountains, where Frans and I worked with three people form Theater am Bahnhof, the theme became for me intimacy and loss. The project started with a donation of neglected furniture, and ended at least for me with the question how to deal with trauma’s of loss, how to accept the burden of your own personal tragic moments.

I wrote text, for a chair that committed suicide:

Dear R, my dearest friend, brother, bear, bride, groom what ever. You immediately noticed that I was fragile as hell. I wasn’t a chair to sit on. I was a chair to dream with. And boy, what did we dream together. But then life slapped me in the face, with a kid and everything. Now I understand: I can’t love. I am sorry, so sorry, so united sorry. I don’t fear death anymore, Alles liebe, liebe, liebe.

I wrote this text left handed, sleeping with the chair on the ground, both our paints down, when I ended the letter with a point, It felt like the moment before dying, before losing. It was very emotional, sometimes for the pubic, sometimes for me.

In my apartment in Paris, i become very home-orientated, after rehearsal going home, washing clothes, reading dutch newspaper on the net m just the life of a decent man of 50.