Premiere
A museum director in Switzerland once told me that a historical museum isn’t supposed to teach us about the past, its job is to open up for different ways of creating futures. Yoga, some say, is all about letting go, acknowledging that you are here and this is precisely where you should be.
Neither a historical museum nor yoga is telling us about the future or your presence, they only offer you the awareness, the vibe, the intimacy or distance.
A French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, proposed. “Treating philosophy as the power to “think about” seems to be giving it a great deal, but in fact takes everything away from it.”
A dedication can never ask for anything in return. A gift must not have a function. This piece was made for someone that will not come back.
To dance, to really dance is a kind of farewell, to oneself and to the dance that touches.
My mother’s friends ask me. It must be fantastic to work with dance, to be able to express yourself every day? I nod and mumble something agreeable, but in fact. What makes me continue to dance is the other way around. I dance because when I dance I don’t need to express myself. When I dance my past is fading, when I dance I let go and when I dance I’m not about anything at all. I am with the dance and that’s all that matters.
Together with Sidney I wanted to dance to the music of Schubert. To one of the song cycles, “Winterreise”. For no particular reason and that’s perhaps what made it urgent. The fact that we didn’t know made it impossible to leave. Urgency is only urgent as long as it is not known.
Schubert is maybe old or past tense but what about if the music is like a historical museum. Or consider the possibility that the journey proposed through Wilhelm Müller’s poems is a matter of learning to let go, of being precisely where you are supposed to be, here and now. Or that poetry, or dance, is precisely not about, but everything else, and that that is poetry or dance.
Life over the last two or so years has for all of us been miserable. In different ways but for all of us. This is a weird us, an us that largely seem to lack forms of together or sensations of each other. We want to share a few short dances with you. A gentle acknowledgement of the times we have endured, a celebration nevertheless. A space for longing and fear, anger and resignment, love and endings. Nothing is on offer except that.
By and with: Sidney Barnes and Mårten Spångberg. Elena Zemskova on piano, Supported by NPN Neustart Kultur Stepping Out, Kulturrådet Sverige and Konstnärsnämnden. Thanks to PAF St. Erme and Lake Studios Berlin.