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last one

9. 10. 2013 // // Kategorie Randnotizen 2013

I just arrived in New York to work in another project, so it is time to finish my reports about the forest project.

what can i say

i feel no regret for diving with the snake in skin-deep water

stones welcomed me as if i was one of them

the waterfall showed me her timeless face

the audience sat in silence, and gratefully i wondered:

“how much time must i spent here on the stone before representation loses its coherent meaning? “

just to be

me

you

stone

water

wind

leaves

bodies

DSC01925 kopie

i thank all the people, who read the randnotizen of the forestproject. i hoped it worked for them to get a glimpse of the context where it comes from.

while writing, it was a pleasure to think of you, where-ever you were and with how many, that didn’t matter to me. the fact that i could imagine that someone could be there to read this, forced me to be as sincere as possible.

Strange that i still need an audience to be honest.

Talking about honesty and audience, i learned a lot of being an audience of the forest

I wish you and me still a lot of long walks in the forest, robert

fuck culture/become you own artist

6. 10. 2013 // // Kategorie Randnotizen 2013

fuck culture/become you own artist“ is my populist translation of  a thought of Terence McKenna. He considered culture as a conservative phenomena, that forces people to adapt to a common understanding of aesthetics and values.  He considered making art as a revolutionary radical  and highly personal reshaping of the reality as you have learned to live it by being part of a certain culture.

This art approach asks everyone to become a poet. Or at least to find his or her own sense of beauty in creating his own reality. When i talk about me being an artist – also in this blog –  i refer to my desire to get a poetic perspective on the world we live in. When i think of art, i would love that everyone become a  home made artist, or homemade shaman.

Yesterday i went to the exhibition of AA Bronson in Rotterdam. I consider him as the greatest example of becoming a home-made shaman, healer, artist and (queer)activist. Several people asked me if i already saw the exhibition, because his work made them think about the things i want to make.

Seeing him, laying naked in an enchanted forest made me very happy. It looked as if i saw my older and wiser brother, in love with the trees. And i discovered that there is still a lot to learn when you consider yourself as a younger brother…

bronsson

gender after thoughts

2. 10. 2013 // // Kategorie Randnotizen 2013

I am sitting in the train back to Amsterdam. Thinking of the forest in Peggau makes me melancholic.  I feel relieved. But there is also a lot to think, before we translate this piece into an indoor version in the theatre Brut in December.

Some people mentioned a political incorrectness in how we worked with only one woman in an overall male cast. Even the fact that she wore a bra, was interpreted as a political incorrect statement.

It was clear that it was something very dangerous to work with only one woman on a project that started with ridiculing and boasting male behavior as we know that from the fauns. But it seemed a nice challenge.

The first run, more than a week before the premiere was the most aggressive in portraying men as vain and childish. We were rough in exhausting the cliches of male behavior to the extreme. We were shouting like crazy, pitiful men who think they are in power by getting loud in group actions. But we missed personal voices and slowly our performance became more innocent, i thought, investigating simple rituals celebrating the power of sexuality or little boys playing macho’s.

FlyerLODEUR kopie

At the day of our last performance, the national elections took place in Austria, and in Steiermark, the place where we performed, the extreme right wing happened to be the big winner. Their voters were mainly men, what makes me think that we must dive much deeper in why men are so attracted to ideologies which are based on defending their own territory and excluding others.

Back to Eun Kyung. She missed the first residency in the summer in Vienna, so she wasn’t part of the making of the exhibitionistic faun scenes. As a counterpart to all this careless dick-showing activities Eun Kyung and I made a tit duet – she got her breasts when she was fourteen years old and I when is was forty –  we were playing with them, testing them in how to excite each other, but instead of seeing that as a vulnerable, intimate act between friends, in the same way like boys playing with their dicks, someone saw this scene as an act of a dirty old director who could play out his phantasies with an innocent dancer who couldn’t refuse. It made me about how some people look at theatre as a stage of representation  Even that she has a beautiful body, and that for sure I haven’t one in classical standards, did represent something provocative in the eye of this beholder.

To find a place for her own, amidst the faun violence, Eun Kyung developed a dance solo at the waterfall, in the centre of the attention, in a peaceful, quiet, meditative surrounding, with the men of the cast more in the periphery and less dance like in their way of being there.

I asked Eun Kyung to work with me, because i wanted to work with her,and i was interested what she would make, i did not ask her because she was a woman. Years ago I did a pattern recognition therapy session – I did a lot of these things to learn about the mechanics of theatre- and I chose a man to play my mother, and two women to represent my father and me. Everyone was confused, also the therapist, except me, because this man looked exactly like my mother, and I recognized something of me and my father in these two women.

The forest was great all the days, of performing, first there was some sunshine, but more and more the weather became rainy, grim, and cold, the forest however still enchanted the audience and in the last scene most of the spectators could lose themselves in being there amidst the trees, waterfall, stones and open sky. Some of the spectators didn’t want to leave the forest and we had a lot of thanks of giving them this experience of being quiet in nature.

I will miss being with the trees, or putting myself in the water or dressing myself onto the stones in the cold. I had for a long time this desire to become one with the stones, and now I had the chance to try it out, i learned a lot, also what this means from a dance or performative perspective.

In the forest in Peggau i felt  in having contact with a tree, that I am dealing with a male energy, it felt like meeting my best friend as a lover, when I went into the water and I was at the waterfall, I felt connected to a certain female energy, it felt like being in the arms of mother earth, it was the same feminine wisdom, which  I met after drinking ayuasca.

Experiencing these gender-differences in meeting different energies in the forest, i think it says something about my subconscious, conditioned by my experiences in the past.

Skin contact with the trees, stones or the water seemed to be very important to experience the different qualities to connect. What the hell am I going to experience in the theatre? Shall I fall in love with the theatre as I did with the forest. Am I so promiscuous?

after premiere/ all bloggers united

27. 9. 2013 // // Kategorie Randnotizen 2013

yesterday the first show, it went very well, except one monologue, done by me, which became too loud and angry. i was afraid that not everyone would hear me so i started in a loud voice,and came immediately in an emotional stream and could not get out of it. but for the rest, what i could see from my side of the show it went very well. Afterwards we had nice talks with the audience.

the forest was great as ever, there were poetic moments with falling leaves, and at the end the sun appeared again at the waterfall. The best light show we can wish. When I walked out of this final scene, alone, leaving the rest of the group behind, going back to the starting point, i felt that is twas my last exit, it felt as if this was my turning point to leave making theatre for good. I immediately know that this feeling is something very pathetic and Narcissistic.  A lot of what i do in this performance is a coming together of elements of work i did the last years. It seems like a swan song.

An hour later i heard myself planning the making of a big musical with friends who came to see the show. So a lot of sentiments ran through my veins, while ending performing this piece. And sentiments are nothing more than direct reactions on what happens to you at a specific moment and can also be easily forgotten.

Stewart Home wrote in his blog that at last there was a communication between us, the participants of the Randnotizen, by my reaction on his hacking and blocking me and forcing me to write my contribution on the i-pad of someone else. He is right, till now, i had no space to react on others, because i was fully occupied by making a piece in a collaborative process. All my energy got into explaining my ideas to people inside the process, my own colleagues.  I discovered, I am a person who immediately defends  his way of thinking afraid that it wouldn’t get a chance otherwise. Sometimes it felt that I am so full of myself, that there is no place for other opinions.  My first reaction is very protective, and than later, when i think of my own, i can become more open to the opinions of others. But I can’t stand anymore, sentences that block me, as  ” do you really think the public will get it.” when i was working on silence or dissolving into a landscape. My blog was a kind of protected place to reflect my thoughts in a somehow protective environment.

Of course i felt that what i wrote, operates as something very marginal, and a somewhat floating personal diary in a side frame of a festival. Most of the blogs earn their right of existence for their criticism by revealing hidden facts and giving strong opinions.

I must admit it is difficult for me to react on strong opinions, i am afraid to get to fast into a discussion about who is right, tackling each other with arguments. But from now on i will give it a try. so to be continued…

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world where are you? i am mirroring myself in a little water stream in the forest. in a pose of narcissus, who came home