united sorry

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.