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Meet Jerry, an obsessive but frustrated director who decides to turn his back on the theatre in favour of a controversial new project. But things soon start to go wrong. As he struggles with the demands of his role as leader, he is plagued by surreal dreams conjured up by his guilty conscience.
A theatre director on the edge of a nervous breakdown descends into a dark and frankly baffling night of the soul in contemporary Belgian dance choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’ first full-length feature, which closed the more experimental Orizzionti section of this year’s Venice Film Festivall.
Though the information is provided nowhere in the film itself, it comes as little surprise to discover that Monkey Sandwich was originally conceived as the audiovisual component of a dance performance staged by the director in 2010. It may have some standalone potential as a theatrical prospect on home territory at the extreme end of the arthouse market, but elsewhere prospects look to be slim.
Killick plays Jerry, an English theatre director working with a German group on a new production. Coming across as a kind of Waiting for Guffman set in the world not of amateur dramatics but of high art theatre, and occasionally hilarious, the film’s half-hour-long first section burns with a slow satirical fuse, raising interesting questions along the way about our obsessive search for ‘authenticity’ in the fakery that is acting.
But then, all of a sudden, we change location and the fuse splutters out; in fact, it feels like we’re in a different film altogether. We see Jerry and Carly (Wijs), a woman who may or may not be his wife, getting a lift with an American neo-beatnik type, Davis (Freeman), who owns an odd vinyl record of electronic screams and grunts called Monkey Sandwich. Jerry ends up ‘directing’ a project to divert the course of a river in the village where Davis appears to live with a huge brood of kids. From here on in, things just get odder and odder.
Storytelling – seemingly improvised, and oft interrupted – is one of Vandekeybus’s key themes. But the stories told – like Jerry’s ever-changing tale of why one of his fingers is just a stump – are never particularly illuminating, and it’s not until the end that we get some sort of explanation, when a small end-title informs us that the stories included in the film “are urban legends created with the featured actors”. At least this journey into the narrative abyss is engagingly filmed and scored. - Lee Marshall
www.screendaily.com/
Wim Vandekeybus is director, choreographer, actor and photographer. After having worked for two years with Jan Fabre, he created his own working structure Ultima Vez in 1986.
His first performance What the Body Does Not Remember (1987) was an instant hit and changed the landscape of modern dance. Since then, Wim Vandekeybus has created more then twenty choreographies which tour worldwide. He discovered the medium of film during the realisation of his first dance films. A few years later he started writing and directing fictional short films.
Wim Vandekeybus received many awards at art film and short film festivals (Cannes Film Festival, Palm Spring International Film Festival, Price for Best Camera & Choreography Los Angeles, Prague d’Or, Montreal Festival du Film sur l’art, IMZ Dance Screen Award, …).
He is presently developing his feature film GALLOPING MIND.
Blush
CD jewel case / very few in Stock
Published by Sub Rosa in 1991
Music and stories from Immer das Selbe gelogen
Music performed by Charo Calvo & X-Legged Sally
Texts by Carlo Verano, Ultima Vez & Wim Vandekeybus
Director, choreographer, actor and photographer Wim Vandekeybus was born on June 30th, 1963 in Herenthout (Belgium). Brought up in a rural environment as a son of a veterinarian, Vandekeybus was often in contact with animals in their natural environment. These experiences had a great emotional impact on him. Animals, their movements, their instinctive reactions and their trust in their own physical power are often integrated into his performances. He began his studies in psychology in Leuven, but did not complete them, irritated, as he says himself, by the surplus of 'objective science'. His interest in the complex relationship between body and spirit remained. A workshop with the Flemish theatre director and playwright Paul Peyskens brought him into contact with theatre. He followed some dance courses (classic, modern, tango) and took up film and photography.
In 1985 he auditioned for Jan Fabre. Vandekeybus was chosen and during two years he travelled the world with the The Power of Theatrical Madness, playing one of the two naked kings. While touring with Jan Fabre he met painter/photographer Octavio Iturbe in Madrid, who later became an important artistic collaborator. In 1986 he withdrew for several months in Madrid with a group of young, inexperienced dancers calling themselves Ultima Vez (Spanish for 'Last Time') to work on his first production. In June 1987 What the Body Does Not Remember premièred at the Toneelschuur in Haarlem (the Netherlands). The dancing in What the Body... was powered by the music of Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch. With tempestuous energy and strength the performers made daring leaps, launched themselves into the air and smartly intercepted each other's falls. Bricks were thrown above each other's heads. Every gesture had to stick to an absolutely precise timing; the performers put their trust in and surrendered to their instincts. Since What the Body... Wim Vandekeybus has created nearly twenty performances with changing international casts and has made nearly as many film and video productions. From his very first performance, music has been an important stimulus for his productions. He has commissioned works from, among others, Peter Vermeersch, Thierry De Mey, David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Eavesdropper and David Eugene Edwards.
Immer das Selbe gelogen (1991) was a sensitive portrait of 89 year
old German variety artist Carlo Verano and of Vandekeybus' friendship
with the man. While the first performances are characterized by a lack
of coherence or storyline, more narrative and theatrical elements crawl
into his creations: texts, literary, mythological and philosophical
references.
In June 1992 Wim Vandekeybus and Walter Verdin directed La Mentira, a dance video based on Immer das Selbe gelogen, recorded at deSingel in Antwerp, and in the rough and deserted landscape around Granada in the south of Spain. - www.subrosa.net/
'BLUSH': Wim Vandekeybus and David Eugene Edwards join forces.
"Actually, I am quite an annihilator."
By Stefanie de Jonge
from Belgian magazine Humo, issue 3237, 17 September 2002.
Now he has the whole world under a spell, Wim Vandekeybus finally decides to have a world première of his dance company Ultima Vez in Belgium once again. "Jan Goossen, artistic director of the Bottelarij
theatre once was my assistant" he says, "we understand one another,
everything is going smoothly." You should not take that too literally: 'Blush'
writhes and stretches and once again challenges the dancer's instincts
until they fall down. Only this time they will do so while David Eugene
Edwards, leader of Sixteen Horsepower, is singing his heart out.
DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS: "I know Wim by way of Tom Barman."
WIM VANDEKEYBUS: "dEUS has opened for Sixteen Horsepower, and the other way round. When I told Tom I was looking for a deep and driven voice, someone who adds colour, he immediately thought of Edwards. I didn't know him, but his solo-CD Woven Hand had just been released, and I could attend a concert shortly. That made me so enthusiastic that when the show was I stepped up to him straightaway. I saw him thinking Who is that?!"
EDWARDS [laughs]: "Yes, he looked rather wild, but after that we did hit it off. He send me videos, and then I went to Brussels and for ten days I watched every rehearsal with my wife and my daughter - for she dances too. And what we saw was really marvellous.
"I love the way Wim works. I love it when people go far. Those rehearsals where so intense. The dancers go home at night full of bruises, sometimes they almost hobble home. Or to the hospital, haha. I love people who go to the limit like that. He does what he does, not stopping to think about what is proper or normal, or what people might think of him. Nothing is contrived. He is and does what he feels, raw emotion. That is difficult. If you surrender yourself like that, you soon become somewhat silly. "
HUMO: You're aware of that too?
EDWARDS: "Yes, In what I do, I can easily become ridiculous too. Perhaps I am. I don't know."
HUMO: At the Botanique earlier this year when singing 'Down the Forest' [sic] you dared to chant the line 'Jesus above Everything' with your guitar above your head.
EDWARDS [laughs]: "Yes, I do that. For me it is the only way to go about things: without fearing that you look foolish, or nuts, or whatever."
VANDEKEYBUS: "David's voice screams, but it goes so deep that your hair stands on end. He is a very spiritual man, very much inspired by the New Testament. He has a certain heavy quality. He does play medieval instruments, but in a rock way. He has nothing to do with fashion; he has something very pure. That tallies with the piece."
HUMO: Why?
VANDEKEYBUS: "Blush, you blush when you show an aspect of yourself that you really don't want to show. It is about something welling up inside you; a chemical reaction within you, you get a hot flush and phew! there it is. I feel that when David is singing: there's an upsurge and then he gets into a trance."
"In dancing I don't want to see someone who is just displaying what he can do well. That doesn't grip me. Only when you do exactly the opposite, let go of your prowess and go against it, only then it becomes interesting. You're skating over thin ice and lose power and your certainties. That is true for the audience too. I don't want the people in the auditorium thinking: 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!' the whole time. No, I want them to hate what they see, and think: No! Wrong! And only on a given moment, after they have had to fight for it within themselves: Yyyesss!"
"I still like to demolish everything and not be certain of anything, in my private life too. Of course you have to be able to be in command of that a little - I don't advise unstable people to take this far. But actually, I am quite an annihilator. Again and again I want to build up something new and surprise myself. I don't believe at all - because I happen to have a certain status - that I will again make a good production anyhow and that I will just tell my dancers what they have to do. I have eight new dancers, and they have to help me too, give me new things. That is what I do ask of them. And I myself will dance again too, even though, because of several accidents on stage, I don't have any ligaments in one knee or a meniscus. All new risks, but that's why 'Blush' will be good, you hear. [laughs]."
ALL THE BOYS TOGETHER
HUMO: You like to reduce everything to the bone. You once did an all-male performance, after that one with only women.
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes, the absence of women in the all-men production did provide some unforgettable moments. I was somewhat afraid that the result would be too macho men-only, but the opposite happened: they became less macho and held conversations like:'Shall I lift you up now, or will you lift me up?' [laughs] Very tender really."
"No, the all-female show actually was much tougher. It was strange that in everything the women said or did men played a part under the skin - that's why, at a certain moment, they drew a silhouette of a man with soil."
"With the men, women immediately didn't play a part anymore. Perhaps we're more boyish, we sometimes act silly, and yes we can more easily be absorbed completely in something. Not for nothing the male-production was called 'In Spite of Wishing and Wanting'."
HUMO: Because in that too the male instinct gets the better of their will.
EDWARDS: "I myself constantly have the feeling that I am again doing something wrong. I do try to do everything correctly, but some of my inclinations are stronger than my will."
"You know my father left all of a sudden one day. He had become a biker, rode about his bike, got addicted to alcohol and drugs. He only returned back home when he had leukaemia. I have tapes on which he says that he is thankful to God for that disease, because it brought him back to his faith."
VANDEKEYBUS: "When I read, I often end up with the 'Metamorphoses' by Ovid because they all deal with the fragility of men, the human aspect. About the war raging inside us."
EDWARDS: " 'Blush' is also roughly based on 'Orpheus and Eurydice', about the lyre player who goes looking for his dead wife in the nether world. That myth is about the longing for something of which you know it isn't good. I also sing about that internal struggle, about human weakness, about temptation, about Good and Evil."
"Every artist gets jammed because he is inclined to zero in on himself more than is good for his housemates. And here on Pukkelpop I will probably drink wine again and perhaps too much, and then I become an arse-hole. Letting yourself go, nearly always, is at the expense of other people."
VANDENKEYBUS: "Really we are talking about the same, we only give it a different name. Within you Good fights Evil."
EDWARDS: "And within you, your instinct fights your intellect, or your conscious your unconsciousness."
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes. That is well put. I also see evil as something poetic, I think. Like I said: I do like destruction."
EDWARDS: "Mmm. I'm no different. That is in our nature. Ever since the beginning of time, so to speak. We could live in complete freedom, and we did not choose Good but Evil, out of egoism and self-interest. We want to be our own master, don't we? But unfortunately... And now we can't go back anymore."
VANDEKEYBUS: "I don't think in religious terms that much, but I do understand that faith helps to give meaning to things."
HUMO: David Eugene, as a child you always used to go to church with your grandfather.
EDWARDS: "Yes, after my parents' divorce I was raised by him. I still see him often. I also like to be at home with my wife and children. I think family is important. To keep yourself humble. To have a better grasp of where you're coming from and what you are."
HUMO: Wim Vandekeybus, your trust is rather more based on your subconscious and your instinct, on nature. You know nature, because your father was a veterinary surgeon.
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes. There is something calm about an animal, it does not want to explain things or make up stories. An animal is what it is. It kills when it is hungry. When I look around me I see that everybody in the city is leading a more and more schizophrenic life: faster and faster, more ups and downs, stressed out every weekend because they have to go away and have to feel 'Yeah!', have to feel good. When I'm at home and I see farmers calmly going about their own way that feels very earthed. We will be lying covered in earth soon, won't we? We have only borrowed this life here shortly."
EDWARDS: "I don't think that our intelligence - or that what we call our intelligence - and so-called progress have brought us closer to the core. Just look at all the natural disasters, the weather... I think God uses all the progress we have made - everything we have tried to win our way - to show us we have no power. That we are not masters."
VANDEKYBUS: "Nothing is certain, is it? And what makes sense to some, makes no sense to others. Only the uncertainty and the fear to loose things is primary for everybody. That is in everybody's nature. That shackles him to his emotions, as soon as there are things he cannot say goodbye to. There always is a moment when you start to become attached."
COUP DE FOUDRE
EDWARDS: "Man was not made to be alone. It says so in the Bible [laughs]."
HUMO: In 'Blush' men and women are dancing together again.
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes, you also blush when a crush starts - from the first coup de foudre (stroke of lightning) until the disillusionment and everything in between. Hope, pain, the discovery that you are somebody else with each different woman, as if you lead a double-life. Doubt - Orpheus looks over his shoulder, because he wrongly doubts of love. Shame... "
HUMO: How often does a rock-musician fight temptation?
EDWARDS: "There always is temptation. My starting point is that I
am not able to resist it. I was raised in a church where dancing was a
no-no, and women were not allowed to use make-up or wear pants. Those
rules, they are fading now, are based on fear: fear of men to be tempted
and never to be redeemed by God for punishment. Nobody is proof against
temptation. The only thing you see is that people are sublimating it,
by working hard or creating something beautiful, even thought that is
nothing more then giving into something else that is also powerful. Even
when you do say: 'I won't do this because I love my wife', or 'I love
my job', - it is hard not to give in. I am failing too. No, without
God's help I would constantly be surprised by temptation." - www.16horsepower.com/
Meet Jerry, an obsessive but frustrated director who decides to turn his back on the theatre in favour of a controversial new project. But things soon start to go wrong. As he struggles with the demands of his role as leader, he is plagued by surreal dreams conjured up by his guilty conscience.
Monkey Sandwich is a portmanteau film with a
captivating tangle of stories involving the search for an unborn child, a
disturbing hunting trip, a haunted LP, a screaming piglet and a river
gone rogue.
The stories in Monkey Sandwich are urban myths or stories created with or by the actors. The film was originally part of a stage performance of the same name.
The stories in Monkey Sandwich are urban myths or stories created with or by the actors. The film was originally part of a stage performance of the same name.
Film plays a significant part in Monkey Sandwich.
Yet it is utterly characteristic of Vandekeybus: the distinctive energy
and visual power splatter off the silver screen. The whole landscape
dances. On stage we see the young performer Damien Chapelle. In an
ingenious interaction with the film, he flits around, swinging between
loneliness and happiness, in the process creating a world of his own.
Sometimes it's manic-euphoric, sometimes vulnerable, helpless and
questing, just like the characters projected over his head, with whom he
vainly attempts to make contact.
Monkey Sandwich is a tangle of stories. From the hilarious opening scenes to the lies of the theatre and the madness of leadership, such universal themes as solitude and loss rise to the surface.
Vandekeybus weaves all this masterfully into a captivating trip and succeeds marvellously in his ambitious intention of fusing film and living performance art.
In 2011 the film Monkey Sandwich was released seperately. Have a look at the website.
Monkey Sandwich is a tangle of stories. From the hilarious opening scenes to the lies of the theatre and the madness of leadership, such universal themes as solitude and loss rise to the surface.
Vandekeybus weaves all this masterfully into a captivating trip and succeeds marvellously in his ambitious intention of fusing film and living performance art.
In 2011 the film Monkey Sandwich was released seperately. Have a look at the website.
A theatre director on the edge of a nervous breakdown descends into a dark and frankly baffling night of the soul in contemporary Belgian dance choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’ first full-length feature, which closed the more experimental Orizzionti section of this year’s Venice Film Festivall.
Storytelling – seemingly improvised, and oft interrupted – is one of Vandekeybus’s key themes.An uncompromising lead performance by UK fringe theatre actor Jerry Killick does its best to glue the film’s two virtually unrelated parts together. And there are flashes of disturbing oneiric power in the story once we let go of the fact that it all has to make perfect narrative sense. But though shades of David Lynch and early Lars Von Trier peep through at times, Vandekeybus lacks those directors’ engagement (however conflictual) with cinematic storylines, structures and genres.
Though the information is provided nowhere in the film itself, it comes as little surprise to discover that Monkey Sandwich was originally conceived as the audiovisual component of a dance performance staged by the director in 2010. It may have some standalone potential as a theatrical prospect on home territory at the extreme end of the arthouse market, but elsewhere prospects look to be slim.
Killick plays Jerry, an English theatre director working with a German group on a new production. Coming across as a kind of Waiting for Guffman set in the world not of amateur dramatics but of high art theatre, and occasionally hilarious, the film’s half-hour-long first section burns with a slow satirical fuse, raising interesting questions along the way about our obsessive search for ‘authenticity’ in the fakery that is acting.
But then, all of a sudden, we change location and the fuse splutters out; in fact, it feels like we’re in a different film altogether. We see Jerry and Carly (Wijs), a woman who may or may not be his wife, getting a lift with an American neo-beatnik type, Davis (Freeman), who owns an odd vinyl record of electronic screams and grunts called Monkey Sandwich. Jerry ends up ‘directing’ a project to divert the course of a river in the village where Davis appears to live with a huge brood of kids. From here on in, things just get odder and odder.
Storytelling – seemingly improvised, and oft interrupted – is one of Vandekeybus’s key themes. But the stories told – like Jerry’s ever-changing tale of why one of his fingers is just a stump – are never particularly illuminating, and it’s not until the end that we get some sort of explanation, when a small end-title informs us that the stories included in the film “are urban legends created with the featured actors”. At least this journey into the narrative abyss is engagingly filmed and scored. - Lee Marshall
www.screendaily.com/
Wim Vandekeybus is director, choreographer, actor and photographer. After having worked for two years with Jan Fabre, he created his own working structure Ultima Vez in 1986.
His first performance What the Body Does Not Remember (1987) was an instant hit and changed the landscape of modern dance. Since then, Wim Vandekeybus has created more then twenty choreographies which tour worldwide. He discovered the medium of film during the realisation of his first dance films. A few years later he started writing and directing fictional short films.
Wim Vandekeybus received many awards at art film and short film festivals (Cannes Film Festival, Palm Spring International Film Festival, Price for Best Camera & Choreography Los Angeles, Prague d’Or, Montreal Festival du Film sur l’art, IMZ Dance Screen Award, …).
He is presently developing his feature film GALLOPING MIND.
Blush
In 2004 Wim Vandekeybus shot a 52-minute feature based on his successful performance Blush. Carried by the music of David Eugene Edwards and Woven Hand and with texts by the Flemish author Peter Verhelst, Blush is a dazzling voyage swinging between the heavenly landscapes of Corsica and the slummiest depths of Brussels. It is an exploration of the savage subconscious, of mythical forests, of conflicting instincts, of imagination, where the body has reasons unknown to the mind. In dance sequences of attraction, confrontation and repulsion the performers take on animal metamorphoses…
What the Body Does Not Remember
Immer das Selbe Gelogen
CD jewel case / very few in StockPublished by Sub Rosa in 1991
Music and stories from Immer das Selbe gelogen
Music performed by Charo Calvo & X-Legged Sally
Texts by Carlo Verano, Ultima Vez & Wim Vandekeybus
Director, choreographer, actor and photographer Wim Vandekeybus was born on June 30th, 1963 in Herenthout (Belgium). Brought up in a rural environment as a son of a veterinarian, Vandekeybus was often in contact with animals in their natural environment. These experiences had a great emotional impact on him. Animals, their movements, their instinctive reactions and their trust in their own physical power are often integrated into his performances. He began his studies in psychology in Leuven, but did not complete them, irritated, as he says himself, by the surplus of 'objective science'. His interest in the complex relationship between body and spirit remained. A workshop with the Flemish theatre director and playwright Paul Peyskens brought him into contact with theatre. He followed some dance courses (classic, modern, tango) and took up film and photography.
In 1985 he auditioned for Jan Fabre. Vandekeybus was chosen and during two years he travelled the world with the The Power of Theatrical Madness, playing one of the two naked kings. While touring with Jan Fabre he met painter/photographer Octavio Iturbe in Madrid, who later became an important artistic collaborator. In 1986 he withdrew for several months in Madrid with a group of young, inexperienced dancers calling themselves Ultima Vez (Spanish for 'Last Time') to work on his first production. In June 1987 What the Body Does Not Remember premièred at the Toneelschuur in Haarlem (the Netherlands). The dancing in What the Body... was powered by the music of Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch. With tempestuous energy and strength the performers made daring leaps, launched themselves into the air and smartly intercepted each other's falls. Bricks were thrown above each other's heads. Every gesture had to stick to an absolutely precise timing; the performers put their trust in and surrendered to their instincts. Since What the Body... Wim Vandekeybus has created nearly twenty performances with changing international casts and has made nearly as many film and video productions. From his very first performance, music has been an important stimulus for his productions. He has commissioned works from, among others, Peter Vermeersch, Thierry De Mey, David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Eavesdropper and David Eugene Edwards.
Immer das Selbe gelogen (1991) was a sensitive portrait of 89 year
old German variety artist Carlo Verano and of Vandekeybus' friendship
with the man. While the first performances are characterized by a lack
of coherence or storyline, more narrative and theatrical elements crawl
into his creations: texts, literary, mythological and philosophical
references. In June 1992 Wim Vandekeybus and Walter Verdin directed La Mentira, a dance video based on Immer das Selbe gelogen, recorded at deSingel in Antwerp, and in the rough and deserted landscape around Granada in the south of Spain. - www.subrosa.net/
Interview with Wim Vandekeybus | What the Body Does Not Remember
What the Body Does Not Remember (the first piece of work by Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez) captivated audiences when it premiered in 1987. 25 years later, the show has been revived and it’s coming to The Abbey Theatre from 16th - 18th May as part of the Dublin Dance Festival 2013. We caught up with Wim Vandekeybus to talk about this iconic piece of dance theatre.
Can you tell us a little bit about the background to Ultima Vez and What the Body Does Not Remember?
Well we are a company who exist 26 years. We still have very physical work, which tours all over the world and What the Body Does Remember was the very first show of it. It was about the instinct - the reflexes of the body. And it's a show with with very special music also, nine dancers and it's very physical, so you have six themes, which are about reflexes, which are about feeling - like pick pockets, about frisking, how people have contacts, about throwing bricks in the air, about standing on bodies, how they avoid things. So it's really very basic elements to build a whole show of one hour 20 in a very physical world where there is a lot of freedom because it also has a kind of abstraction to imagine many things.
Why did you decide to revive it now?
I think one of the decisions is that I made in the last two years four shows but I'm also busy with a fiction film. It's a feature film that I will shoot this summer in Hungary and Romania, which is nothing to do with dance. And it was for us also a good opportunity to take back as a 25th anniversary that show. But also to have a show that could tour a bit more without me as I have a rehearsal assistant who tours it. And that many people want to see - they just went to Austrailia, Los Angeles, they go to Taiwan, to Korea, to Brazil, to Europe. So it's really a world tour with that piece and it's still very appealing for an audience who never could have seen it. Because even some of the dancers who are on stage were not born when it was made.
Has the show itself evolved since its original showing in 1987?
Maybe the original original yes. But in 1995 we had another tour with it and we did it again for the first time. It's the only show that we ever took again in fact. And there there was a slightly different version in some duets or so. But the brick scene, the first scene is exactly the same. And the frisking scene - there is one couple who has changed a little bit. And we do it now with nine instead of ten as the dancers now are much better trained and so we felt like we can do it with nine people to keep everybody very busy and to make it even more intensive in fact. It's very much similar tot the original one.
You've been touring with it since February - what has the reception been like so far?
Yeah it has been amazing. It's like contemporary dance now gets more conceptual. People want to explain a lot and be very intellectual sometimes and What the Body is a bit the opposite of that so people have a big hunger to see something straight forward and in that way the reception was surprisingly very very well. So people who come to see it they buy it immediately.
You have a background in psychology. Does this play a part in any of your creative work?
Not really in fact. I studied psychology but after one year and a half I stopped and started to perform with Jan Fabre and I was more busy with film and photography in fact. But of course it can have an important element in my work, in what I write but it's not that I'm executing my professional psychosis in my work. I don't think so. My intuition, probably yes.
Much of your work involves the use of various other mediums alongside dance. Do you think this represents the future of dance theatre?
I think so, but you have to feel which medium is really a feeling. I just love people sometimes who are just interested in one thing and they go very deep in it but I sometimes need more variation as I’m not a real specialist in one of them. And at the end, you have to use the media to tell what you want to communicate, what you want to make and express. And in this way I think it's very good and we can almost see the opposite, that dance should be used in other mediums instead of dance using other mediums. I still find that dancing is maybe like a tool that has to transport something and in this way it's logic that it needs other media in what it can be used.
What inspires you when creating a new piece of work?
It depends. I mostly have to inspire myself. First I need to know what I want to do before I do the casting and sometimes it's very vague. I'm also a creative who loves to start creation almost and just let things come so I did Oedipus once and then you had the reference of the text, but I do that very few times that I know exactly what it is I like to work with - writers who write something during the rehearsal period, composers who compose originally music during the rehearsal period and the dance and the piece get made in the three/four months that we work on it. So what inspires me sometimes is the desire of what I want to tell. What inspires me also is the question of why people go to theatre? Why people come to see us? And lately this interactive thing also, questioning the audience and giving a kind of creative function to the audience who have to make their puzzle of how they interpret what they see is a very fascinating point. Besides this, I think I'm a story teller - that I use always the stage as a communication medium. In the beginning I was very inspired by the animals because my father was a vet. So I was very inspired by the wildness of the uncontrollable instinct of animals. I must say that working with people is also one of the biggest inspirations. I worked with old people, with blind dancers, with very big composers - David Byrne worked with me, Marc Ribot composed a lot, David Eugene Edwards, now Mauro Pawlowski - so it's the mixture of how you put something together that you can start to work on a show.
You mentioned earlier that you're working on a feature film. What is that project about?
Yeah, the title is Galloping Mind and it's a fictional story about twins who split when they are born and after ten years they meet each other again. It's a film with a lot of kids. Also the kids against the adult world, the educated world against the wild world. So there are kids who don't have parents also. And it's a film full of horses, water, kids, so all will be difficult to produce but we're going to shoot it now in Hungary and in Romania from July on.
And are you working on any new dance projects?
We made one called booty Looting and it's with a photographer on scene, which is touring now. We are touring Oedipus sill. Yesterday we did the last one of New Black and I will make a new one around mid '14 - there will be a new show will live music also.
What The Body Does Not Remember runs in the Abbey Theatre from 16th - 18th May at 7.30pm. Tickets: €18 - €35. For more information go to www.dublindancefestival.ie
For more Dublin Dance Festival shows click here.
Can you tell us a little bit about the background to Ultima Vez and What the Body Does Not Remember?
Well we are a company who exist 26 years. We still have very physical work, which tours all over the world and What the Body Does Remember was the very first show of it. It was about the instinct - the reflexes of the body. And it's a show with with very special music also, nine dancers and it's very physical, so you have six themes, which are about reflexes, which are about feeling - like pick pockets, about frisking, how people have contacts, about throwing bricks in the air, about standing on bodies, how they avoid things. So it's really very basic elements to build a whole show of one hour 20 in a very physical world where there is a lot of freedom because it also has a kind of abstraction to imagine many things.
Why did you decide to revive it now?
I think one of the decisions is that I made in the last two years four shows but I'm also busy with a fiction film. It's a feature film that I will shoot this summer in Hungary and Romania, which is nothing to do with dance. And it was for us also a good opportunity to take back as a 25th anniversary that show. But also to have a show that could tour a bit more without me as I have a rehearsal assistant who tours it. And that many people want to see - they just went to Austrailia, Los Angeles, they go to Taiwan, to Korea, to Brazil, to Europe. So it's really a world tour with that piece and it's still very appealing for an audience who never could have seen it. Because even some of the dancers who are on stage were not born when it was made.
Has the show itself evolved since its original showing in 1987?
Maybe the original original yes. But in 1995 we had another tour with it and we did it again for the first time. It's the only show that we ever took again in fact. And there there was a slightly different version in some duets or so. But the brick scene, the first scene is exactly the same. And the frisking scene - there is one couple who has changed a little bit. And we do it now with nine instead of ten as the dancers now are much better trained and so we felt like we can do it with nine people to keep everybody very busy and to make it even more intensive in fact. It's very much similar tot the original one.
You've been touring with it since February - what has the reception been like so far?
Yeah it has been amazing. It's like contemporary dance now gets more conceptual. People want to explain a lot and be very intellectual sometimes and What the Body is a bit the opposite of that so people have a big hunger to see something straight forward and in that way the reception was surprisingly very very well. So people who come to see it they buy it immediately.
You have a background in psychology. Does this play a part in any of your creative work?
Not really in fact. I studied psychology but after one year and a half I stopped and started to perform with Jan Fabre and I was more busy with film and photography in fact. But of course it can have an important element in my work, in what I write but it's not that I'm executing my professional psychosis in my work. I don't think so. My intuition, probably yes.
Much of your work involves the use of various other mediums alongside dance. Do you think this represents the future of dance theatre?
I think so, but you have to feel which medium is really a feeling. I just love people sometimes who are just interested in one thing and they go very deep in it but I sometimes need more variation as I’m not a real specialist in one of them. And at the end, you have to use the media to tell what you want to communicate, what you want to make and express. And in this way I think it's very good and we can almost see the opposite, that dance should be used in other mediums instead of dance using other mediums. I still find that dancing is maybe like a tool that has to transport something and in this way it's logic that it needs other media in what it can be used.
What inspires you when creating a new piece of work?
It depends. I mostly have to inspire myself. First I need to know what I want to do before I do the casting and sometimes it's very vague. I'm also a creative who loves to start creation almost and just let things come so I did Oedipus once and then you had the reference of the text, but I do that very few times that I know exactly what it is I like to work with - writers who write something during the rehearsal period, composers who compose originally music during the rehearsal period and the dance and the piece get made in the three/four months that we work on it. So what inspires me sometimes is the desire of what I want to tell. What inspires me also is the question of why people go to theatre? Why people come to see us? And lately this interactive thing also, questioning the audience and giving a kind of creative function to the audience who have to make their puzzle of how they interpret what they see is a very fascinating point. Besides this, I think I'm a story teller - that I use always the stage as a communication medium. In the beginning I was very inspired by the animals because my father was a vet. So I was very inspired by the wildness of the uncontrollable instinct of animals. I must say that working with people is also one of the biggest inspirations. I worked with old people, with blind dancers, with very big composers - David Byrne worked with me, Marc Ribot composed a lot, David Eugene Edwards, now Mauro Pawlowski - so it's the mixture of how you put something together that you can start to work on a show.
You mentioned earlier that you're working on a feature film. What is that project about?
Yeah, the title is Galloping Mind and it's a fictional story about twins who split when they are born and after ten years they meet each other again. It's a film with a lot of kids. Also the kids against the adult world, the educated world against the wild world. So there are kids who don't have parents also. And it's a film full of horses, water, kids, so all will be difficult to produce but we're going to shoot it now in Hungary and in Romania from July on.
And are you working on any new dance projects?
We made one called booty Looting and it's with a photographer on scene, which is touring now. We are touring Oedipus sill. Yesterday we did the last one of New Black and I will make a new one around mid '14 - there will be a new show will live music also.
What The Body Does Not Remember runs in the Abbey Theatre from 16th - 18th May at 7.30pm. Tickets: €18 - €35. For more information go to www.dublindancefestival.ie
For more Dublin Dance Festival shows click here.
Story by EI Team
"Actually, I am quite an annihilator."
from Belgian magazine Humo, issue 3237, 17 September 2002.
DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS: "I know Wim by way of Tom Barman."
WIM VANDEKEYBUS: "dEUS has opened for Sixteen Horsepower, and the other way round. When I told Tom I was looking for a deep and driven voice, someone who adds colour, he immediately thought of Edwards. I didn't know him, but his solo-CD Woven Hand had just been released, and I could attend a concert shortly. That made me so enthusiastic that when the show was I stepped up to him straightaway. I saw him thinking Who is that?!"
EDWARDS [laughs]: "Yes, he looked rather wild, but after that we did hit it off. He send me videos, and then I went to Brussels and for ten days I watched every rehearsal with my wife and my daughter - for she dances too. And what we saw was really marvellous.
"I love the way Wim works. I love it when people go far. Those rehearsals where so intense. The dancers go home at night full of bruises, sometimes they almost hobble home. Or to the hospital, haha. I love people who go to the limit like that. He does what he does, not stopping to think about what is proper or normal, or what people might think of him. Nothing is contrived. He is and does what he feels, raw emotion. That is difficult. If you surrender yourself like that, you soon become somewhat silly. "
HUMO: You're aware of that too?
EDWARDS: "Yes, In what I do, I can easily become ridiculous too. Perhaps I am. I don't know."
HUMO: At the Botanique earlier this year when singing 'Down the Forest' [sic] you dared to chant the line 'Jesus above Everything' with your guitar above your head.
EDWARDS [laughs]: "Yes, I do that. For me it is the only way to go about things: without fearing that you look foolish, or nuts, or whatever."
VANDEKEYBUS: "David's voice screams, but it goes so deep that your hair stands on end. He is a very spiritual man, very much inspired by the New Testament. He has a certain heavy quality. He does play medieval instruments, but in a rock way. He has nothing to do with fashion; he has something very pure. That tallies with the piece."
HUMO: Why?
VANDEKEYBUS: "Blush, you blush when you show an aspect of yourself that you really don't want to show. It is about something welling up inside you; a chemical reaction within you, you get a hot flush and phew! there it is. I feel that when David is singing: there's an upsurge and then he gets into a trance."
"In dancing I don't want to see someone who is just displaying what he can do well. That doesn't grip me. Only when you do exactly the opposite, let go of your prowess and go against it, only then it becomes interesting. You're skating over thin ice and lose power and your certainties. That is true for the audience too. I don't want the people in the auditorium thinking: 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!' the whole time. No, I want them to hate what they see, and think: No! Wrong! And only on a given moment, after they have had to fight for it within themselves: Yyyesss!"
"I still like to demolish everything and not be certain of anything, in my private life too. Of course you have to be able to be in command of that a little - I don't advise unstable people to take this far. But actually, I am quite an annihilator. Again and again I want to build up something new and surprise myself. I don't believe at all - because I happen to have a certain status - that I will again make a good production anyhow and that I will just tell my dancers what they have to do. I have eight new dancers, and they have to help me too, give me new things. That is what I do ask of them. And I myself will dance again too, even though, because of several accidents on stage, I don't have any ligaments in one knee or a meniscus. All new risks, but that's why 'Blush' will be good, you hear. [laughs]."
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes, the absence of women in the all-men production did provide some unforgettable moments. I was somewhat afraid that the result would be too macho men-only, but the opposite happened: they became less macho and held conversations like:'Shall I lift you up now, or will you lift me up?' [laughs] Very tender really."
"No, the all-female show actually was much tougher. It was strange that in everything the women said or did men played a part under the skin - that's why, at a certain moment, they drew a silhouette of a man with soil."
"With the men, women immediately didn't play a part anymore. Perhaps we're more boyish, we sometimes act silly, and yes we can more easily be absorbed completely in something. Not for nothing the male-production was called 'In Spite of Wishing and Wanting'."
HUMO: Because in that too the male instinct gets the better of their will.
EDWARDS: "I myself constantly have the feeling that I am again doing something wrong. I do try to do everything correctly, but some of my inclinations are stronger than my will."
"You know my father left all of a sudden one day. He had become a biker, rode about his bike, got addicted to alcohol and drugs. He only returned back home when he had leukaemia. I have tapes on which he says that he is thankful to God for that disease, because it brought him back to his faith."
VANDEKEYBUS: "When I read, I often end up with the 'Metamorphoses' by Ovid because they all deal with the fragility of men, the human aspect. About the war raging inside us."
EDWARDS: " 'Blush' is also roughly based on 'Orpheus and Eurydice', about the lyre player who goes looking for his dead wife in the nether world. That myth is about the longing for something of which you know it isn't good. I also sing about that internal struggle, about human weakness, about temptation, about Good and Evil."
"Every artist gets jammed because he is inclined to zero in on himself more than is good for his housemates. And here on Pukkelpop I will probably drink wine again and perhaps too much, and then I become an arse-hole. Letting yourself go, nearly always, is at the expense of other people."
VANDENKEYBUS: "Really we are talking about the same, we only give it a different name. Within you Good fights Evil."
EDWARDS: "And within you, your instinct fights your intellect, or your conscious your unconsciousness."
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes. That is well put. I also see evil as something poetic, I think. Like I said: I do like destruction."
EDWARDS: "Mmm. I'm no different. That is in our nature. Ever since the beginning of time, so to speak. We could live in complete freedom, and we did not choose Good but Evil, out of egoism and self-interest. We want to be our own master, don't we? But unfortunately... And now we can't go back anymore."
VANDEKEYBUS: "I don't think in religious terms that much, but I do understand that faith helps to give meaning to things."
HUMO: David Eugene, as a child you always used to go to church with your grandfather.
EDWARDS: "Yes, after my parents' divorce I was raised by him. I still see him often. I also like to be at home with my wife and children. I think family is important. To keep yourself humble. To have a better grasp of where you're coming from and what you are."
HUMO: Wim Vandekeybus, your trust is rather more based on your subconscious and your instinct, on nature. You know nature, because your father was a veterinary surgeon.
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes. There is something calm about an animal, it does not want to explain things or make up stories. An animal is what it is. It kills when it is hungry. When I look around me I see that everybody in the city is leading a more and more schizophrenic life: faster and faster, more ups and downs, stressed out every weekend because they have to go away and have to feel 'Yeah!', have to feel good. When I'm at home and I see farmers calmly going about their own way that feels very earthed. We will be lying covered in earth soon, won't we? We have only borrowed this life here shortly."
EDWARDS: "I don't think that our intelligence - or that what we call our intelligence - and so-called progress have brought us closer to the core. Just look at all the natural disasters, the weather... I think God uses all the progress we have made - everything we have tried to win our way - to show us we have no power. That we are not masters."
VANDEKYBUS: "Nothing is certain, is it? And what makes sense to some, makes no sense to others. Only the uncertainty and the fear to loose things is primary for everybody. That is in everybody's nature. That shackles him to his emotions, as soon as there are things he cannot say goodbye to. There always is a moment when you start to become attached."
HUMO: In 'Blush' men and women are dancing together again.
VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes, you also blush when a crush starts - from the first coup de foudre (stroke of lightning) until the disillusionment and everything in between. Hope, pain, the discovery that you are somebody else with each different woman, as if you lead a double-life. Doubt - Orpheus looks over his shoulder, because he wrongly doubts of love. Shame... "
HUMO: How often does a rock-musician fight temptation?
Blush for One’s Life As a Work of Art.
Recently I
read an interview with Wim Vandekeybus (from the dance company Ultima
Vez) and David Eugene Edwards (from the band Wovenhand) who both worked
together on several dance performances (http://www.16horsepower.com/humo0902.html). Vandekeybus created the choreographies and Edwards composed the music.
In this
interview Vandekeybus talked about his personal life and its connection
to his art. From those statements I was able to learn. Why? Well, if you
know a little bit about David Eugene Edwards and his music, then you
are aware, that he is a truly committed christian, who doesn’t hold back
with the ideas of his somehow traditional belief. Yet he is a highly
respected and international acclaimed musician.
In the
mentioned interview Edwards talks about Vandekeybus: “I love the way Wim
works. I love it when people go far. Those rehearsals where so intense.
The dancers go home at night full of bruises, sometimes they almost
hobble home. Or to the hospital, haha. I love people who go to the limit
like that. He does what he does, not stopping to think about what is
proper or normal, or what people might think of him. Nothing is
contrived. He is and does what he feels, raw emotion. That is difficult.
If you surrender yourself like that, you soon become somewhat silly.”
Picking up this valuation Stefanie de Jonge asks: “You’re aware of that
too?”, whereupon Edwards answers: “Yes, In what I do, I can easily
become ridiculous too. Perhaps I am. I don’t know.” So she digs deeper:
“At the Botanique earlier this year when singing ‘Down the Forest’ [sic]
you dared to chant the line ‘Jesus above Everything’ with your guitar
above your head.” So now you know what I mean when I say, that he’s
really a committed christian. 
Even Edwards laughs: “Yes, I do that. For me it is the only way to go
about things: without fearing that you look foolish, or nuts, or
whatever.”
Even Edwards laughs: “Yes, I do that. For me it is the only way to go
about things: without fearing that you look foolish, or nuts, or
whatever.”
And that’s
the point I want to comment on with some statements by Vandekeybus.
Exactly after the last cited answer of Edwards Vandekeybus talks about
him, how he sees his art, but also himself as well as about his own art,
which he creates with Ultima Vez. “David’s voice screams, but it goes
so deep that your hair stands on end. He is a very spiritual man, very
much inspired by the New Testament. He has a certain heavy quality. He
does play medieval instruments, but in a rock way. He has nothing to do
with fashion; he has something very pure. That tallies with the piece.”
“Why?,” asks de Jonge. The following answer by Vandekeybus is of great
importance for me. “Blush, you blush when you show an aspect of yourself
that you really don’t want to show. It is about something welling up
inside you; a chemical reaction within you, you get a hot flush and
phew! there it is. I feel that when David is singing: there’s an upsurge
and then he gets into a trance. In dancing I don’t want to see someone
who is just displaying what he can do well. That doesn’t grip me. Only
when you do exactly the opposite, let go of your prowess and go against
it, only then it becomes interesting. You’re skating over thin ice and
lose power and your certainties. That is true for the audience too. I
don’t want the people in the auditorium thinking: ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’
the whole time. No, I want them to hate what they see, and think: No!
Wrong! And only on a given moment, after they have had to fight for it
within themselves: Yyyesss! I still like to demolish everything and not
be certain of anything, in my private life too. Of course you have to be
able to be in command of that a little – I don’t advise unstable people
to take this far. But actually, I am quite an annihilator. Again and
again I want to build up something new and surprise myself. I don’t
believe at all – because I happen to have a certain status – that I will
again make a good production anyhow and that I will just tell my
dancers what they have to do. I have eight new dancers, and they have to
help me too, give me new things. That is what I do ask of them. And I
myself will dance again too, even though, because of several accidents
on stage, I don’t have any ligaments in one knee or a meniscus. All new
risks, but that’s why ‘Blush’ will be good, you hear.”
Are these
crazy ideas of some freak who’s too strange to be understood by anyone
ordinary or just by some few people who feel and experience the same way
as he? Are these statements, which can’t be communicated, which are
therefore dangerous and frightening? I want to try to reformulate them
in a more common and universal language. In a language, where these
ideas can be justified and discussed. To this effect I present some
thoughts by Michel Foucault.
Creative demolition!
In “The
Masked Philosopher” Foucault talks about a exceptional human suffering
and about human curiosity. He claims, that we don’t suffer because of an
alleged void of the world. No, we suffer due to reality’s plentitude
and our lack of means to think about that. From this he concludes, that
it is our task to be curious.
At
least three aspects he sees connected with curiosity. First, we should
worry about all the things in the world, about all our experience, about
everything we encounter. And we should bestow great care on all of
this. Second, we should separate ourselves from everything that is
familiar and see everything completely different. Third, we should sense
everything in a strange and unique way.
That’s why
philosophy for Foucault is thinking about our relation to truth. Also
philosophy is a tentative attempt to find new laws of the game, that
means an alteration of traditional values. That’s why we should think
different, act different and be different.
With regard
to i.e. sexual ethics that means for him (cf. “The Social Triumph of
Sexual Will”, “An Aesthetics of Existence”), that institutions (i.e.
marriage between a man and a woman) led to an impoverishment within the
world of relationships. Which is to say that the spectrum of possible
relationships is reduced by institutions. Hence, he appeals to resist
them.
I want to
express this a little bit more moderate – still with Foucault. He refers
to a shift in moral life. Morality in the form of a system, in the form
of a codex of rules to be obeyed is vanishing. Which doesn’t mean that
morality as such is vanishing. Rather, it has to be given a new shape.
That is personal ethics. He calls it “ethics of existence” or
“aesthetics of existence”. He describes it as an effort to claim one’s
freedom and to give one’s life a form, which can be accepted by oneself
and by others.
Here we can
see the closeness to his notion of living one’s life as a work of art
(cf. “Conversation with Werner Schroeter”, “The Care of the Truth”, “On
the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”). To live
one’s life as a work of art means to create by oneself and in
collaboration with others entities, relationships and qualities which
can’t be given names. His appeal is, that I as an individual should be
the worker on the beauty of my own life.
Risking blush by living one’s live as a work of art.
For
Foucault as a gay homosexuality gave him the opportunity to live this
kind of ethics (cf. “Friendship As a Way of Life”). He sees in the
reality of two men falling in love with each other the inversion of the
institution to its opposite. In other words, to his point of view love
is opposed to law, rules and habit (cf. Arnold Retzer: Lob der Vernunftehe).
He gives an
example. When an older man loves a younger woman, this relationship
will be determined by institution. But when an older man falls in love
with a younger man, then there will be no code through which both men
could communicate. They are forced to invent a new kind of relationship.
Foucault calls this relationship “friendship”, which he defines as the
sum of all the things by which we can give each other joy and delight.
I suppose,
what he wanted us to learn by homosexuality is that: due to the fact
that homosexuals weren’t able to fall back on pre-formulated codes, they
were able to make up really unlikely ways of life, which would never be
like any of those institutionalised relationships. Well, call into mind
his ideas on human suffering due to the plentifulness of reality and
human curiosity. Foucault’s appeal is, that we should live in manifold
emotional relationships and love relationships.
And since
there are just a few relationships institutionalised as well as ways of
life, to commit onself to a way of life, which one can accept and can be
accepted by others, means to risk to blush. - herzmaschine.wordpress.com/
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