united sorry

I fly again back to Vienna, to do a project in the mountains. I was in Paris for a week, to rehearse with Latifa. I have a wonderful apartment, in Montreuil. It remembers me a lot of staying in Green Point, New York. The same rural architecture, like a small village, but then with a big town mentality and a lot of immigrants, who own little shops, and cheap, but excellent restaurants.
That’s my life at the moment. Totally alone, living in a city where I hardly know anyone, or where I act like that. Because to start a new project, takes a lot of solitude, and a kind of mild depression, acted out in being very unquiet with myself. Not wanting to see anyone else than the people, with whom I work in the day. There is also a long what to do list, but I postpone everything.

I saw this week, a reconstruction of an old work of Anna Halprin. I was very curious, because she is really one of my inspirations, although I never saw a performance of her, just by her writings and what I read about her. Her work is abstract, political, therapeutic, and works even with healing. The performance I saw disappointed me. It was difficult not to fall asleep. Reconstructions are most of the time difficult. Her work was to liberate the dance, and it was interesting to imagine how revolutionary this performance was in that time ( with the nakedness, the score as a chain of actions).
But now it was mainly dull to watch. I was quite irritated by the way of limiting the event to an aesthetic one. Hopefully it was in that time an act of living to perform in this way on stage, a revolutionary statement. Now the presence of the performers had mainly a protective shield of executing the thing as beautifully as possible. It seemed to me a kind of holiday for the performers, when they have nothing to add, comment, or let say just live, instead of acting it. It is difficult to do a reconstruction of a piece, when it limits itself to an aesthetic outside and doesn’t discuss, translate the ideology. Now the whole piece became a bourgeois product, instead of a piece which was quite related with the hippie culture, and the new age movement. Anna Halprin was the one who introduced Gestalt therapy in dance, and now we are confronted with performers who chose the safe side of executing the score, and are fine with it. Because again, I was the only one who was critical, I get old I think, everyone liked it, although some admitted that they slept several times during the show. And a woman from New York, who I met during the dinner afterwards with the performers, is going to show it in her theatre.
When we we’re eating together, suddenly I was totally aware, that at the desk of this woman form New York there are some unseen dvd’s of my work, I once gave to her assistant, I didn’t hear about it. I felt irritated first, like a neglected child almost, because it would be so nice to show the performance feminine delight to the people in New York. But I was a curator myself, and I know how hard it is to see all of the work, especially when the work isn’t embedded in a kind of exchange structure that generates money. But it strengthened my belief in our work. Perhaps it doesn’t sell very easy in the market, but I feel it has something to say, about our time, about life and death and for sure about how we can live, love and work, without getting stuck in power issues.