kinesthetic-formed dance

reform (theater-) dance from our kinesthetic sense, above all others
 train ourselves to let the movement be shaped,
not by movement language that we've learned,
but from our kinesthesy in relation to how we perceive and relate with the world within and around us

-> how are sound, visuals, even acting re-formed by such a sensation / experience?

I keep saying that Kinetic Awareness® is an exceptionally good technique for re-discovering the fundamentals of the self, understanding the root of one's own bodymindbeing, before any demands or judgements - then develop whatever potential there is and is desired.
Other than more μετά-oriented approaches, such as Ideokinesis, or BodyMindCentering, or even Feldenkrais, Kinetic Awareness® minimizes any instrumental meta-structures (imagery, instructions, narratives, pre-set movement-sequences etc.) and gives maximum space for experience and self-guided exploration. Props are employed by the student upon their own chosing. While it leaves such meta-structures behind, it is at the same time very systematic, because it helps to discover and follow the system of the practitioner's individual bodymind. so rather than anyone or anything external, the individual practitioner, the individual bodymindbeing, is the system (!) 

-> does dance truly come from the most basic experience of movement as being alive / on our frequency? can we enjoy music because we have a sense and experience of movement to draw from?

same for any other related art-form that involves sight, sound, smell, etc etc.
(and ideally beyond confinements of any single cultural zone)

getting ready for re-performing 'Sokrates' : the dance/r is present & 24-uur cultuur

While reviewing the videos for the presentations at Mirta Demare International Visual Art​, titled the dance/r is present | de dans/er is aanwezig, Aug 29th - Sept4th, I came to think of Gertrude Stein​'s Tender Buttons, written in 1914. This work had fascinated me since my 20s, not in the least because I understood that they were a turning point in Stein's writing and a historical moment, comparable to Arnold Schönberg's 6 Little Pieces for Piano, op. 19 (1913) which preceded his 12-tone composition works. Stein wrote portraits of objects, food, and concluded with a very long piece called 'Rooms'. The dance Sokrates, in a way, makes similar portraits in dance, out of the moment, as fully as possible, in an ongoing stream-of consciousness, or, as Stein put it, in a continuous present. Just like the recognizable ways in which Stein dealt with words, my partner correctly remarked that as the days wore, on he could notice that I had recognizable patterns in my movements, how I dealt with the information of the various moments.

When I went for a short walk to Heemraadsplein yesterday, for a moment I sat and enjoyed watching the passers-by who crossed the plaza, which had been my initial inspiration for Kruisingen-Heemraadsplein (Dutch meaning 'crossings') After having seen and evaluated myself from the Venice-videos, my perception felt more sensitive than what I believe I could process back then. I wonder how much I will be able to reflect this deeper sensitivity in the coming performances August 29th and 30th, as well as September 12th, at 24 uur cultuur, the Rotterdam 24-hour cultural festival where local art institutions manifest themselves. 

blood on my hands and other thoughts about communication and marginalization

Today I sent in my application for a Research Week at Random Collision in Groningen September 12-20, 2015, which I understood to be about individual (in)visibility in relation to social/ly dominant/ groups, especially if the individual enacts desires or states that are deemed alien by such (a) group(s).

It made me re-visit Pelléas material / b.a.n.q. and re-live my continued ambivalence about this work from 2013. There are many complications, exactly because of the interplay of various levels of privilege and (un)acknowledgement.

I did realize that my very position a bit closer to the margins of White Male Class Privilege (White, but not 'Western', cis-male passing, but not heterosexual and when possible not gender-conforming, part Gentry/nobility, part 'middle class', but neither fully) and the experience of being a foreigner, either by ethnicity or class, through at least three generations, has played out in the development of my professional career in the Netherlands. The un-alignedness with the social surroundings continued and still can produce some very awkward situations.

The latest article "White Fragility, Silence, and Supremacy: Why All White Hands Are Bloody"
by choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe confirmed my decision to perform in the near future with (fake-) blood on the palms of my hands, when I perform my own work. While I am not U.S.-American, I do find it important to raise very similar questions for the situation in Europe, e.g. how to this very day thousands of people get killed at the Schengen-borders, the livelihoods of many millions destroyed by many hundreds of years of various kinds of colonialism and exploitation which among others, benefits European elites.
(It is an entirely different chapter how much of 'trickle-down' has happened as a consequence for the general population, then and now, and how much the same kind of Colonialism was inflicted on the various Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and other nations on the European subcontinent, under the banner of first the Roman Empire and then "Christianization", before more and more of them became the new Romans, and continued to do the same in return to others ...) 

Of course part of the desired outcome will depend on the awareness of the witnessing spectator / audience. I do not intend to always let people know why I need to do this, unless they ask, and even then, I would not always feel like having to explain. I know for myself that this is something that I very much need to do. Not having a large-scale company to think of can make such a decision a little bit easier to realize. An advantage of living and working a bit closer to the edges of White Male Class privilege which will hopefully contribute to further undo the very same privilege, in my private life and in my work as a choreographer, who signed on to be responsible for creating kinesthetic experiences, also referred to as dance. 

Skytime 2014 - a first reflection (anticipating Winter ...)

(screenshot on a computer in Berlin, showing the two livestreams next to each other)
it’s been a week since the successful performance of #Skytime2014 #Moonbow / #MoonRainbows in New York City, and Schiedam, in the Netherlands. summer has clearly ended, fall is now, time to start preparing for winter. (reflection, clarifying, growing directions)

i am clear that a long phase of investigating that started in 2013 about where I want to grow to as a choreographer can start to articulate itself and be formulated this coming winter/period. #directness of #sensorial #experience is becoming one keyphrase, #re-balancing #oppression, and #decolonization another. 

kinetic awareness

as i prepared for the concert, i was working with the equality of all body parts when it comes to bearing weight. my body was mostly horizontal, verticality happened as a result of local contraction of body parts. 

the decision to listen to the parts bearing most weight when it comes to the next move, and to have any body part “on top” remain flexible and able to contract in order to take its weight off from carrying parts, became important technical discoveries, that greatly helped the ‘flying’ and lifting bits.

i also greatly value this understanding, in terms of working on emancipation.
translated into decolonization, for example, this contracting and taking weight off would be people from a privileged and dominant culture making space by themselves for people from a less dominant culture and enabling a healthy move all over, unlike fixations.

(or the same could be done on the level of individuals, obviously)

visceral / imaginary / livestream

re-balancing dreaming (which I so far always chose not to influence by my consciousness to let it do its own thing) with waking and dancing, was another major theme. my performance-mode clearly is not used to be open to dreaming while dancing ...

in a sense, to work with people via livestream in more or less real-time, across time-zones, and across vast planetary distances on something that usually is rather immediate and visceral as improvisation of a dance as a performance, was a special experience in itself.
there were times when the streaming would be interrupted or repeating, so at some moments I no longer knew what was going on in New York, nor could I see the totality of the environment, the night-sky, or all related works of all contributors. added that whatever came was at least 20 -40 seconds after it had happened. and the same with what came back from our side. what was real? what was imagined? did it matter? it was a good challenge to always be completely thrown back to oneself, and face the chance to trust one's own impulses and ebb and flow of energy ...

something new
finally, I realized that there was great value for me in the fact that both sides of the concert happened in venues that are related but not an integral part of lage-scale / institutionally funded circuits. i believe this gave a lot of freedom about what was possible, with fewer expectations to conform to already existing formula.
and I very much like the understanding of do-it-yourself, even when it is done on a professional level. i also always love how very successful this approach is when I work with 'amateur' dancers and in a direct legacy from the works of Elaine Summers, Anna Halprin, or Rudolf von Laban.'Invitation to Secret Dancers' continues to challenge me as to allowing fun and that 'it's just dance' (like John Cage liked his music to be described as 'it's just sound' ... and laugh)

great thanks to everyone who has been involved!
the sky's (not) the limit ☺

__
for more information about skytime, please visit www.skytime.org
for my own contributions from the Netherlands, in Dutch and English, welcome to http://hemellopers.blogspot.nl

dance and architecture - sensing and feeling ...

Recently I've been at a lecture evening at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (formerly the National Architecture Institute) on 'Bekleidung' such as used by architects following Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) - While Ákos Moravánsky (Univ. Zürich) talked about Semper and his time, Harry Francis Mallgrave (IIT Chicago) brought up the research of kinesthetic empathy* as a vital interest for architects as well - to FEEL a building, rather than merely 'see' it -

After nearly 20 years of dancing in public space, I was very happy that my understanding of literallly dancing with a building (which simply was on a much much slower scale to change/move than me) found an echo here - voilà  * see here and here for more on the subject


(photo: "Sokrates" 2000 / 2001 Rotterdam -  documentation by Cor Kapaan)

Back to Basics: Which ones?

Currently I am in Berlin for Christmas and the New Year, visiting my partner and my family. After several years of non-committal visits I am beginning to feel very good here, like a yet un-used territory. Using German more often I find that I can tap into ways of thinking that I started at ages 19/20.  The city gives me a feel of tangibility that is very different from how I feel when I am in Rotterdam or New York. Since I was born and grew up in Germany, there is an element of familiarity and known. The patterns are still there and in some respects easier to work with than English or Dutch which both came later, since I used each of these languages in slightly different contexts.

The programming of the Sophiensaele looks particularly interesting to me, because of their political awareness of the times and resonate with my own concerns. HZT and Sasha Waltz / Radiale, still have to check out Hebbel am Ufer

Two articles caught my eyes while we were at a friend of my partner's: in Art August 2013 about Meret Oppenheim and an article in an architecture magazine titled "Back to Basics: a Call for a Return to the Good Old Ways" Both I found significant: Oppenheim's art and consequent ways of working with and despite existing conventions avant la lettre in a number of outlets, shaping her ideas into whichever medium fit them best, as well as exploring the different media, have been longtime sources of inspiration for my own work and researches into cultures and dance in general. Unfortunately I did not take the time to read the second article, but let myself get swayed by my dismay, which is a pity: it would have been good to confront the argumentation of why one would want to revert to the Tried and Proven in a time of Crisis and Change. And whose interests would be served by doing that?

While a new corporate oligarchy seems ready to emerge more visibly, using the Tried and Proven methods of ever more disastrous and rampant destruction of naturally grown habitats for an exploiting lifestyle that resembles the excesses of say 18th century French aristocracy, or Venice in its glory-days, but with much further reaching consequences, I believe it is high time to question such a statement and very seriously ask: which Basics and how far does one care/dare to go? Ancien Régime or a Revolution based on new insights, claiming to go back to the roots of human existence? Both have been discredited in the centuries afterwards as sources of mass-terror and cruelty, always empowering a different elite of people, old style or new. The one difference with Revolution was the idea of opening up a system of political and socio-economical power and make it more widely dynamic, beyond the strata of a single social class of people. But it should be clear by now that any single system will at some point lead to its own crisis, I dare say in order to come closer to fulfilling its own intentions.

One proposal I'd bring in is that any new system should imply an awareness of its own limitations and inherent need for self-renewal over time, in order to not become just the next tool of oppression too easily - plus a knowledge that at some point in its existence, if it is successful, the remnants of the system that was to be replaced and its effects will have to be faced and dealt with.

What can NOT simply be done away with is our ecological condition on this planet where we live. This is at the heart of my critique: If the Tried and Proven have in part brought us to the current catastrophe of our planetary existence, it is high time to ask what can still be done in the face of the current destructions against which the scenario of a movie like The Matrix may seem relatively harmless. Self-delusion, falsely believing that one could continue the old ways just that little longer are clearly no longer tolerable. (see this most recent understanding of our ecological situation (January 2014) Instead it is high time to search and re-orientate amid the ruins of what once was and will take many thousands of years to recover and grow into something different, with or without human presence.

Happy New Year - good be with us all!

Jennifer Edwards and her ... well, wits? or Oh my Goddess, not one of those again!

This is the article in question, if they still have it circulating by the time you read this post ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-edwards/dance-art-income-wages_b_1568875.html
....
Interestingly enough a very similar argumentation that Jennifer Edwards writes in the Huffington Post has been used in the time of an appointed minister of culture in the Netherlands, who publicly boasted about his illiteracy in the arts, then cut back an already small portion of the Dutch financial governmental budget (always less than 1%, even in the 'golden' years of the 1970s) enough to effectively cripple an entire industry, called government-sponsored art, and within that, an even tinier portion reserved for government-sponsored dance. Actually that's not quite true, he didn't mention the call for kinesthetic intellectuals. This was not in the 1930s, but 2012, the culmination of an entire decade of continued devaluation of non-traditional and experimental dance-culture in the Dutch mainstream-media, who succeeded in giving contemporary dance an image only good German critics of the comparable decade above did a better defaming-job with, but unfortunately to very similar results ...


To actually reply to Edwards' argumentation:

In my perspective she is, shall I say it the Japanese way ... a little late with her call for kinesthetic intellectuals, and definitely 20 years late with her call for artistic entrepreneurs.

I seriously ask myself where has she been living all this time: The call for artists to be (more serious) enterpreneurs, (and, in a more veiled way, oh, while we're at it, perhaps please a little less annoying and weird at that, shall we?) is what people have been hurling at dance-professionals for the last five decades ...

And if you want kinestethetic intellectuals: ever at least since the work and legacy of Anna Halprin, Merce Cunningham, Elaine Summers, Judson Dance Theatre, and many others in their wake (Pauline de Groot, Mary O'Donnell, Mary Overlie) dance has been a kinesthetic, sensorial, intellectual enterprize to the max. And this is just within a single cultural zone: On the other side of the Atlantic, it may suffice to name such almost-forgotten capacities as Elsa Gindler. And so on, all over the globe (Germaine d'Acogny, Suprapto, Tatsumi Hijikata, the list is ongoing and here, so far, my education falls short and I have more homework to do - further suggestions are welcome ...)


Elaine Summers is actually an excellent example for such a kinesthetic genius who realized early on the need for dancers and dance professionals to earn a salary, and has been one those who set up and managed a not-for-profit dance company for 30 years, but also recognized the needs of administration, book-keeping and the like. She combined and at age 80+, still combines, arts development, innovation, and business. Check her out, if you like ...

Kinesthetic workers? I'm all for it. Consider asking the droves of dance-therapists who got kicked out in masses when under the influence of Big Pharma, Psychiatry decided that it would be cheaper and therefore better to put people who couldn't cope with the social standard, called 'normality' on pills, to tranquilize them and maybe even keep them 'happy'. When put against the witch-hunt against Wilhelm Reich who dared help people in their physical liberation beyond what was understood at the time, and whose legacy of love, work, and knowledge, is still waiting for fulfillment, the picture gets very austere indeed ...

To respond to her question, very easily and directly: Yes Mz. Edwards, it is very possible to be an entrepreneur and business-person in this field - if there are those who actually will pay for such research, and do not mind the consequent body-empowerment of a population, that - as a result of kinesthetically intelligent dance - will become more able to deal with their physical selves, counter-acting a good millennium or so, of merciless oppression, spiritual propaganda against, and ongoing eradication of body-knowledge, first with the local European, Mediterranean & North African, and then ah, ... overseas.

As I wrote above, in the Netherlands, anno 2012, the very same rhethoric has been used to cripple what was a small, but not entirely starving industry, always continued under the banner of being renewing, innovative, head-on, etc. To give you an even better idea of what had happened: the entire budget for dance in the Netherlands in 2010 was enough to produce ONE single kilometer of autobahn in the Netherlands, ... ONE, you do the math ... and ask yourself, what can be the true motives of someone who loudly calls for reducing an industry called over-grown, but doesn't mind spending billions of tax-euros on bailing out the national banks, to quote the most simple example. Our colleagues from the Science wing have known for years that free research, when it cannot be used on weapons, or industry, is meager.

All of this eerily made and makes me think of a quote from The Handmaid's Tale by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood -  "Our biggest mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again".  In this dystopia, Christian fundamentalists gun down the U.S.-American government, and install a new theocracy in which women not only are not allowed to have property, or have a 'job', but also are barred from reading and writing - (please do NOT bother with the movie by Volker Schlöndorf which essentially fails to get beyond sweaty, albeit forbidden sex and makes patiiarchally acceptable entertainment out of feminist-informed writing ...)

And if you think I am joking, or a bit on the far side, (yes I am emotional in my writing, but that must not distract from what I am presenting for evaluation) - consider reading Sally Banes' excellent article "Power & the Dancing Body", published in this anthology

thanks for reading this far down :-)Good be with us all -