Roberts first period of research was a two week period in september 2009. He worked with Georg Blaschke full time in the studio, and occasionally Gonnie Heggen and Amy Cox joined in. The topic was investigatin Eros and silence.

In this Danslab research we investigate how we can be in our dance, instead of doing our dance. How can we allow movements happen by themselves without any physical effort or forced decisions from our side? I am interested to dance like a magician who hypnotizes the audience with the movements of his whole body. I like to think about movements with a clear beginning and a clear ending, so the audience will be never excluded in following the process of appearing from and disappearing into the void. I am interested to expand the space in between those movements, i want to make this stillness/silence tangible between them. Can such a dance bring the spectator into a state of silence, is my main question.

“You know those moments you have when you enter a silence that’s still and complete and peaceful? That’s the source, the place where everything comes from. In that space, you know everything is connected, that there’s ecology of everything. In that place it is possible for people to have a change of the heart, a change of thinking, a change in their way of being and living in the world.” Linda Hogan says in an interview in the book “Listening to the Land” of Derrick Jensen, an activist book, which discusses the solving of environmental problems from the perspective of silence and Eros.

This combination between silence and Eros let me think how to connect in a different way with myself, the world, my work, my body, my mind, and of course my way of dancing. Dancing is a tool to explore our sensual connection towards our own body, towards the environment we live in, even towards our own mind. This dance research will be an investigation in objectifying and at the same time opening the mind. In dance we discover different capacities of the mind without identifying with them, because we just go through them, in a certain way we depersonalize our mind, we make it a danceable tool, to let it transcend into space.
When Eros is involved, we can’t have the attitude anymore to conquer the space with our dance, we must learn to listen to the space, to everything what surrounds us, so we can develop a sensitivity to become part of the space. Yes, dancing can be a way of finding a strong connection between inside and outside.
We strive for a change in mentality towards the world we live in, by formulating another way of dancing.
Gradually in this research we hope to clarify this holistic approach towards dance, towards he function of art, towards our body, our mind, the other and the world.

Some thoughts after the first two weeks.
We never questioned the aesthetic outcome of what we did. Our concern was to stay honest to the tasks and questions we put in our mind, while dancing. Later we could forget or shift these assignments, intuitively listening to a certain mood of being which we had created by giving ourselves all these tasks to move differently in the space.I discovered the architectural awareness of inhibition. By using stillness in our dancing we created virtual waiting spaces, analogue to the inhibition spaces in time we develop in Alexander Technique.( thinking the directions and postures, before you move) But now these technique became more architectural, not only by thinking in directions of the body, but also by perceiving inside and outside connections between our bodies and the space. Our perception of space and time became elastic, sometimes we could imagine that time slows down so much that it almost had stop and sometimes the space became infinite.
Does eros generate this infinite, transcending experience?
Of course these silent spaces give you a certain ego death, you must disappear in sensual experiences, i am since long looking for this ego death in my work. But how to become moving objects in a gallery space or dance studio without becoming pretentious and overexposed in posture and attitude, or acting like zombies. This will also become a research into the qualities of being, while being exposed in a public situation. I like to imagine how we can develop tools to be in a gallery situation, part of the environment, not moving to much, but still alive and kicking.
The eye of the spectator, in this case jette one moment, makes everything even more vibrating; we need this energy for the ecstacy of the moment. Perhaps it is my age, but I prefer the ecstacy of Eros above the ecstacy of Dionysus. It is about opening the mind, not losing the mind. Till this moment, but it will be continued.

lab diary Georg:

To observe how all the space around my-self gets modeled by me and the others, a self-organized composition takes place, after a certain time more and more peacefully, silent echoes of movements.*Patience is my question, it doesn’t pose itself then anymore, the time concept of egocentric goals dissolves, I do not need to want to get somewhere, to become some-body – i am… and it appears as a highly clear artistic subject – and i wish it to be continued into the sphere of a so called rather private life presence.*There is that protection of the space, offered for a lab, but very soon there reveals to me (again) the clear totality of a performing practice, breaking through walls, penetrating other spaces.*Moving with Gonnie and Robert as if I knew them already for a long time. *Spaces of silence, peace and perception open themselves and trust. and what an influence these states have to a daily posture! *Illusions dissolve, realities open up.*My brain gets silent, there is no need for images, for compulsive tasks.*Robert notes the asymptotic approach to an always increasing awareness.*Accepting the rhythms of life from a bigger/outside dimension to the detail in the actual performing space, bringing me down immediately to an „essential“ of presence. I can call it flow but that may sound somehow esoteric, i perceive it really as a complex task, maybe tool, I see more clearly.

Our eye-focused sculpturing we do with amy in relation to a more listening practice equals in a very fulminating way all sensations of perception. The dialectics of object-subject, of judging an observation disappears totally. Our presence seems more formal, strict then focusing on the listening what we could call more a musical composition then. Looking, no naming. Stillness of bodies.

Every day somehow we deepen our presence together, it gets somehow more „rich“ although we do not question that. Also when we touch and having physical contact we feel in a sublime way more free and more differentiated each day, naked or dressed.

Silence as creator of „tools“ as well. I have the vision of a self-organized dramaturgy that does not need narration, character-building, time concepts, a dramaturgy that involves that from itself. Being empty and happy, also exhausted, alert, sensitized. Again and always again the space between 2 thoughts how it appeals to me as a mirror of the space between 2 bones, between two bodies, between 2 actions.

the silence of listening.the silence of seeing.the silence of sculpturing,the silence of traces.the silence of touching.the silence of being touched by gravity.the silence of having no tasks.

Questions:
Can a state of movement be called meditation when bodies, objects and gestures come and go like thoughts and we are observing that whilst performing?
What is authentic?
Can we distinguish between the terms: trace (of a movement) – echo – resonance and if, where?
Focused on the skeleton: when do we extend functionality to a ritualisation, to a contemplative form? In 4 we have a wonderful sharing of lost egos in a bones’ carrousel.
Is it possible to become a moving landscape of silence?
Can the intimacy of not-knowing be visible? (Deborah Hay)

Some thoughts of Amy Cox after the two weeks:

So, with the inherent drama of 2 or more scores colliding or co-existing in charged visual circumstance, combined with another idea about harnessing a visual landscape in such a way that one performer can sharpen the focus around her/himself while the background softens – so the ever so quietly expanding ecology has the ability to create, in addition, a highly charged visual drama around the sharpening and softening of image..Perhaps so the stage takes on this experience that we ourselves have created within ourselves from stimulating our own visual fields.
Lastly, I want to say that I was quite struck by my feelings when Jette was watching, and how connected I felt with her as a viewer. I have heard Robert, talking many times about how he likes to relate to audiences in a ery open and inviting way. It was very much a pleasure to experience this first hand. I felt quite excited as a performer…
I have in mind a clear episode that we did for Jette where I had died and was inhabiting ‘dead’ while lying, and Georg laid himself across my body sending some very quiet pulses from his hip bone over my surface. They felt like very tiny ripples. And I thought of small plants pushing through rubble – life quietly insisting itself back to the surface. At the same time, if I placed my eye outside, I saw a woman lying dead and her husband mourning over her and eager to love his wife’s body to the very last moment. ( I realize for me the dying practice was indeed quite sexually charged on both days that I practiced it…) When I think of this moment and also Robert’s suggestion to go even slower, it seems like an interesting dramaturgy to set up human connections or physical connections with visual/emotional charge and let them play out as an ecology or evolution with the performers, who in fact are following two separate ’scores’ or ‘trajectories.’