What's going through my head right now #26

‘Transience’

At the moment, I, or rather we, have settled in very well in our new home. We feel comfortable and are slowly getting to know where to find our things. Certain routines are establishing themselves, such as when to have breakfast, where we like to sit when reading or watching a film, where to retreat for a little nap or simply to get out into nature.

I still lack the space to get creative. And the leisure time. But everything is in the starting blocks. The studio is almost finished. One more afternoon and I will be able to rediscover this environment for myself and get started on my artistic work.

And as with sorting and categorising the things in the house – what stays, what goes, what gets a second chance – and especially with realising what ‘treasures’ my artistic work holds, such as numerous documentaries, video cassettes, audio tapes, CDs, posters, reviews, (and most importantly and impressively) the handwritten notebooks, full of thoughts, ideas, concepts, sketches about reflections on rehearsals, corrections and final lighting plans, right up to diary-like entries about the current situation as a dancer, choreographer and ensemble director, which I have in my archive, the question arises: what will happen to all these things when I am no longer here? Will they simply be carelessly thrown away, disposed of, or is there anyone who will pay attention to this collection? Is my artistic work even tangible, comprehensible or visible in any way if only fragments remain?

My memories of all this artistic work are awakened with every relic that passes through my hands, emerging like entire mountains from a sea. Powerful. Majestic. Others like a soap bubble floating past you and bursting shortly afterwards. I could spend hours telling anecdotes, about great performances such as in 1998 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow at a grand gala, or about a rehearsal for the signature work ‘Sextett+1’ in Studio 3 of the ARENA in Zurich. Or when I found out during a rehearsal at the Prague State Opera that I was to be appointed ballet director in Augsburg. Or when, during the dress rehearsal for the duet ‘Little Fields’ with Adriana Mortelliti, I couldn't leave the stage a minute before the end due to severe calf cramps and Adriana more or less carried me off the stage...

Or my nervous breakdown (today you would probably call it burnout) when, under the weight and pressure of my own ensemble, financial difficulties and my own expectations, I seemed to be in real trouble for the first time in my life in Zurich. However, I found a way out of this situation too, and in retrospect I am grateful for the experience, because without it I would not have been able to develop further, see things in life more pragmatically and realistically, and I approached many other projects differently later on, which was mostly successful.

But what about my choreographic work? These works only function in their entirety on stage or in the spaces for which they were created. I can preserve music on recordings or digitally in such a way that I still get an almost 100% impression. Visual art (depending on the material and nature) remains worth seeing and accessible long after it has been created. I can read a book when, where and how I want. And so on and so forth.

A choreography? It's not just steps or dancing bodies. In its entirety, there is the space, the props, the stage design, the lighting, the costumes, the make-up, which all complete the picture. If just one or two elements are missing, i.e. cannot be presented, the work of art is not complete. It remains a fragment. In addition, although a video is a documentary, it is two-dimensional. Numerous components are missing. The depth of the space, the angle from which you sit during the performance, the smells, the olfactory sensations, which simply cannot be conveyed here.

All of this cannot be conveyed through set pieces. It always remains a half-hearted and incomplete attempt to approach the work of art in its entirety.

The more fleeting the moment of perception during a performance, the more I am delighted when, years (sometimes even decades) later, people approach me and remember certain choreographies: the pile of suitcases and the cloud poetry in ‘Cumulus’; or the incredible energy and drive in ‘Swing Alive’; the exciting story that turned my interpretation of the traditional ‘Giselle’ into a crime thriller, which one audience member found far more exciting than a crime drama (although that's not so difficult at the moment).

Such feedback touches me deeply, just as my works touch these people, triggering something in them that continues to resonate years later.

Nevertheless, this transience remains a shortcoming that makes me melancholic, somewhat sad, because the fleeting nature of my art is simply irreversible, and even my boxes full of photos, reviews, documents, poster rolls and correspondence offer no protection against this decay and transience.

But perhaps it is precisely this transience that makes dance and choreography so precious – that they exist only in the moment, in the encounter between dancer and audience, and then live on as a memory, as a feeling, as something that has changed a person forever. And so, in the end, something lasting remains: not in archives and documents, but in the people who were there.