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This street is art

“This street is art” – a street in Vienna, Austria

16 June, 2015, Salzburg: I love performance. Everything about it. Well, almost everything. The dressing room, the warming up, the calming down, the adrenalin rush, the make-up, the fellows, the dressing room food, the drinks after, the beginning of the performance, and the end of it. This is what I felt on Saturday, when I was preparing myself for the clown performance at a festival. And today, sitting in the studio, struggling with my choreographer’s block, or whatever one wants to call it, I was thinking that wasn’t true after all. It isn’t true that I love everything about performance. I often struggle through the making of it quite a bit, thus the after-thought. And yet, it is something I choose every time to engage in, to somehow go through this grueling process of creation, to understand my own limits of how much I am willing to give myself to the work.

Why do I dance (/perform), or engage in dance-making? This question never ceases to find a place in my head, and I guess, neither do I want it to. Somehow, the day this question doesn’t pose itself in front of me anymore, I will have to stop dancing anyway. Not that I have found a reasonable answer. On the contrary, there is none and yet it seems inevitable that I must do this in order to be. A bit of a philosophical-existential curve over there.

Art, as opposed to art-making, is not necessarily the same. It is more universal and all-encompassing. Life is art, and we are not devoid of it, whether we are practising artists or not. How to make this salad, what do I wear today, how can this client be convinced to buy this product, what colour shall the wall be, how do I heal through cancer, how do I heal through a heart-break, what beauty lies in these mountains or the oceans, what lesson lies in this difficulty for me.. Living this life commands creative choice-making all the time. And yet, creative choice-making is of high premium in today’s world and few are willing to pay the price. So, many fail to see this truth. Efficiency has replaced creative choice-making to a large extent and efficiency serves time. Creativity, on the other hand, is independent of time and space; has its own terms. Creative-choosing is the only way to evolve, the only way to live a life that is true to itself.

Whereas art-making is, I sometimes feel, not indispensable to today’s world. “What is the value of what I do to the world I live in?” I wondered since I started to dance professionally. There are millions of people in the world hungry, homeless and suffering. How does my art serve all those people, is an inescapable question. In that world, food is indispensable, not art. And yet I dance. It then becomes difficult to reason out why I dance.

Not that the answer would change anything about me being a dancer, for I am a dancer because I need to be. It is the very core of my being expressing itself. I am not necessarily always happy about it. But it basically makes making art a selfish thing. “Is it all about me? I wonder. Again, that doesn’t change the fact that I engage in it, indicating that thoughts in the head need not always coincide with the needs of the being.

Then I find myself in the studio on certain days, wondering what the hell to do and how and what and where, and I am displeased because I haven’t been able to create something that pleases my ego, and then I think, “Oh, now it has become about me,” and then I go on and move anyway (or sometimes simply sit in the studio and while away my studio-time), because it is about the project that is coming to life and it requires me to get out of the way and allow it to emerge. Hell, I have no idea how to do that! Selfish, selfless, it is egal, as they say in German.

No, I do not love everything about performance. Sometimes I suffer to get through it. Or maybe I love it but I don’t always enjoy it. I am a novice it seems to me. And yet it must be done. Catch a fraction of life, and frame it into 50 minutes of moving about, and call it a performance; where as all I am doing is just living the inevitable life.

I am afraid one day I will be busted for this hoax.