In Spirit

I don’t want to close my eyes anymore
No, I want to dream with open eyes.

I want to see myself dancing the thin line
between you and me
between me and my body
between my bones and my muscles
between my life and my death

“I want to stay in this in between
Not here, not there
Just everywhere”, said the eyes of the dancing body with the traveling mind.

So, we have four days to let our eyes and ears wander to places, which we couldn’t see or hear before.

I hope to meet you there,

Robert Steijn
May 2009


In Spirit
A full body experiment (can't leave the mind out)

In Spirit is about the spirituality of the dancing body and the ritualistic theatrical aspect of this body. Workshops were organized in de Theaterschool from 18 May to 4 June 2008 for SNDO students and guests and there was a public event in De Melkweg Theater, which was open to everybody.

In Spirit was an investigation about the relation mind versus body while dancing and also a meeting of different rituals in a possible theatre context.
In the workshops the focus was on the ecstatic dancing body: For instance: How can the dancer disappear in his act of dancing, or how can he be consumed by the act as Forsythe calls it.

There were attempts to find other roots of dance than going back from postmodern to modern to classical ballet to French court dance etc.  We tried to connect theatre and dance with shamanistic rituals for instance.

Hisako Horikawa was asked to give a Butoh workshop. Hisako was for a long time the muse of Min Tanaka, before she started her solo career. She was at the roots of the body weather laboratory. At the same time a western translation of the Butoh ideology was examined in a workshop given by Boris Charmatz and Robert Steijn.

Both workshops were very body mind orientated in a very practical sense.

Delen