sometimes united sorry writes some texts to explain what they are doing. most ot the time on request.

About telling stories

we wrote the following txt about our obsession to tell and mix stories for the big book of the steirische herbst/2007

We like to tell stories. Bad stories, funny stories, coming of age stories, sitcom stories, absurd stories, eloquent stories, hilarious stories, stories of pain, loss and death, stories of love and luck, personal stories, stories of suburbia, artists stories, stories with pathetic endings, stories with open ends.

We like to tell all these stories at once. We don’t want to bury ourselves in one story. We want to hop from one to another, to another. Our characters can handle multiple plots. They can act as careerist bad guys, while simultaneously showing softness, falling in love, having families. For instance, we like to wrap multiple plots into one, complicated melodrama about a character whose wife starts to work in the office of her husband, only to discover how he misuses his power and then starts to doubt if she married the right man. All stories at the same time…. Etc. etc.

We don’t make stories exclusively for the stage. We do it all the time. It is our daily routine to create stories about our own, personal situations, using ourselves as the main character. We attempt to give meaning to our actions – to find reasons for our behavior. We create these stories about our own lives in an attempt to understand who we are and why we do (or don’t do) what we want to do. We think when we create ourselves as a specific character, with specific possibilities and impossibilities, our life and our role in it will have meaning. How our character reveals itself explains the choices we make in life, or the difficulties we have in making those choices. We start to see the chain of situations in our life as inevitable – a storyline in which hidden motives develop themselves. By believing in the continuation of this character and its storyline, we imagine how the plot of our life develops. We begin to believe our life loses its open-ended quality, and instead, follows the path of the story we have constructed.

Because of this danger, Frans and I believe in engaging with multiple life stories. Never settle on one story of your life. Rather, test and play many stories at once. The practice of choosing another story of your life can take you pleasantly by surprise.

To play a new character, you must believe completely in their value system. However, you must be aware this character and their values will only function within the framework of their story. The moment you jump to another story, you must reorganize both the character and the belief system in which he or she lives. Every character has their own truth. So when you switch to another character, you also must switch your beliefs.

If there is no longer a single story of our life, there is also no longer one absolute truth in life. We must learn to discover how different belief systems generate different ways of seeing life and how these different interpretations of life radically influence the way how life manifests itself.

To play a new character, you must believe completely in their value system. However, you must be aware this character and their values will only function within the framework of their story. The moment you jump to another story, this value system becomes moot and you must reorganize both the character and the belief system in which you live. If there is no longer a single story of our life, there is also no longer one absolute truth about ourselves in life. Our beliefs become relative, and function only until the moment we do not want to live the story anymore. We must learn to discover how different belief systems generate different ways of seeing life and by seeing it in this way we radically influence how life manifests itself.

Frans and I believe that being an artist is, in large part, about asking the question how one is able to believe in his own work. The strength in which you believe what you do on stage is the base of how we work together. On stage we often switch belief systems, we do not promote one absolute truth. Instead, we show the audience what happens when we believe in something passionately at one time, and in an instant, we believe something else.

By seeing us play with different truths on stage and mixing private and public stories together, some critics have called us “post-modern”. From this remark we then make a comprehensible story of our artistic philosophy. It certainly fits with our biography. One of us was a student at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, the other teaches there. The start of this school for choreography has a direct link to the generation of dancers at the Judson Church in New York, who are considered the initiators of Post Modern Dance. Their ideology about dance and art is fundamental to the philosophy of the school.

So what does it mean to be “postmodern”, rather than “modern” dancers? What kind of stories do we tell? Does it mean we are living the story of postmodern choreographers, forty years after the ideology of modern dance was questioned for the first time? In our case, being postmodern was never a rejection of modernity. In the Netherlands, where we started our career in the theatre, modern dance was simply another world, another approach to putting dance on stage. Modern dance, in and of itself, was not enough for us, nor were we ever commenting on it in the first place.

We do not share the story of the pioneers of postmodern dance, who broke the rules of the modern dance generation before them. Their story is a story of a generation gap, a story of refusing the values of the persons who led them into the world of dance, who educated them to become artists. We were not educated in the values of moderist dance. Therefore, we don’t reject the ideology of the generation post modern dance pioneers before us. On the contrary, we want to develop their belief system further, trying to be more radical in their initial attempt to democratize dance. Without knowing it, we behaved liked very good students.

And now we have become a next generation, one that will be followed or rejected by an even newer generation of choreographers. We have also become prolific teachers for emerging artists.

And we assumed it would do no harm to tell the story of the birth of post modernism, to go back in time, where our roots appeared for the first time in history. We have even emphasized the moment of this rupture. The moment that dance history itself jumped from one story to another, the moment of rejecting the fashion of modern dance and the start of post modern dance.

We wonder, can we retell the story as a story of one person, and not as a story of a generation gap, containing on one side a generation who defends what they have found earlier and on the other a new generation who questions the values and power of the generation before them? Could this be the story of a person who danced first in the modern systems of Martha Graham, and suddenly started to think and to create in the post modern world of Trisha Brown? Can our mind be so creative as to jump from one believe to another, believing first dance can reveal the essence of being human and suddenly wanting only to play with the impossibility of dance and communicate more than the movement alone? Can we change in an instant from soul searching to light-hearted? Is this a story about spiritual development? About the letting go of the pretention of modernism and accepting of emptiness of the post modern philosophy? Can we, like history, reinvent ourselves as a snake who loses his skin?

Written by Robert Steijn, on behalf of united sorry,
Edited by KT Niehoff, choreographer in Seattle – as yet to be defined….

Frans just opened the festivalbook to see how the txt is printed.

Letter to Trisha Brown & friends

the following text we wrote to explain why the name of trisha brown was mentioned in the title of the wieder und wider event in vienna, november 2006. some friends of her were asking Tanzquartier if they could tell them what happened.
Dear people who are interested in our performance

There was a question why Trisha was in the title of our piece, and what we did with it in the piece itself.

So some explanations are necessary now.

Frans and I have been working as a duo since three, four years. In our first full length piece: “Frans Poelstra, his dramaturge and Bach” we presented ourselves and our functions in the theatre in a self-ironical way.
Now in “Dan, Martha, Trisha, Frans and Robert”, we place ourselves in the history dance and art. Frans was educated at the School for New Dance Development and I work as a teacher there. This school is highly influenced by concepts and ideas, which were developed by the generation of the Judson Church, the so-called post-modern dance movement.

We want to go back to the rupture between the so-called modern dance like the dance of Martha Graham and the so-called post-modern dance like the dance of Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown. At a certain moment in the performance we send the modern dance body into the jungle to release the ego and all the concepts of being an artist who has to pretend to say something about human existence and human struggle, and provide a rebirth of the post modern dance body, a body that reflects on the language it is speaking, reflects the social context of dancing in front of the audience, of stripping down all illusions.

Yes, we like to play as children on stage, and also the title refers to five surnames, as we all are kids who are playing in the kindergarten, and we all five have different desires and rules to play. Because we live in different times and for sure we have different characters.

From the beginning was clear that Frans wanted to be inspired by Martha Graham to portray concepts and ideologies of the so called modern dance. I chose Trisha Brown, because her work was my first encounter with work of the so-called post-modern choreographers form New York. To be honest I was immediately captured by the silence around the movements, the natural approach to dancing, the lyrical aspect of it.

It was and is - because the work is still under construction - never our intention to reenact work of Martha Graham and Trisha Brown, on the contrary we miss the background, the skills, and even the interest to do so. We used both sources as inspiration for an imaginary life of a dancer/choreographer who started as a modern dancer to become a post-modern choreographer. Texts from interviews, analyses of the work of Martha and Trisha were very helpful to make our own scenes about the career of this imaginary woman.

Martha Grahams autobiography gives an excellent insight in how a modern dancer constructs her own high standards of art, by believing in the mythical almost ritualistic dimension of theatre. The interviews with Trisha Brown liberate art from these pretensions, and show an interest in the material and the composition itself. Art is not longer a channel for the subconscious, but becomes a play with the impossible.

In the modern dance phase of our imaginary woman we are finding our own dancers identity by practicing and disciplining the body in front of the mirror. Also in our performance there is a dream part where the subconscious generates creativity, in the post-modern phase of her career she is talking with the public while she is dancing (inspired by Accumulation by Talking of Trisha Brown and Performer, Audience, Mirror of Dan Graham) and analyzing the behavior of the public who is visible in the mirror (also inspired by Dan Graham, but instead of his phenomenological approach, we pretend to look into the dreams and desires of the public).

We had fun with the differences between the modern and the post modern. Martha Graham talks about the levitation of the body, while Trisha Brown talks about the desire of every dancer to fly. For us, the difference between the two words “levitate” and “fly” are meaningful, and we use them both in the piece.

I hope it becomes clear that by being inspired by all these thoughts of these two pioneers of dance we create our own performance around a female imaginary choreographer who must give up her original belief system, to allow another to enter her creative mind. And in this sense the performance is not an easy one to digest. For us it is about the painful process of manifesting your self as an artist, making choices in your private life, discipline yourself to high standards and then suddenly you must give up control, everything you know, you must liberate yourself of holy tasks, but also to free yourself of the anxiety for old age, to lose the person you wanted to be, and you disciplined yourself to be.

…. From contraction to release…. from someone you wanted to be, to accept the person you are… the dramaturgy is about getting a life, not afraid to die, to renew yourself…. It is also a piece about loneliness, because it is a lonely path.

As you can see, for us this performance has many layers. After a relatively short working period we have performed the piece twice for public, on the 10th of October at the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier, with dancer/performer Latifa Laâbissi, and on the 9th of November at TQW in Vienna with the musician Martin Siewert. Now we go on, with composing further, working with the music, building more layers etc.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Steijn