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It seems like there is always something to do better.
It can be a motivated thought but it can be also discouraging.

So what is it that makes something "work"? That makes you say "this is it"?
Everything can be done in so many different ways, but in real time it happens only in one way, and I need to choose this one way.
When you feel like you found something and its "working", you start to feel good and comfortable about it, then comes the red light telling you "hey, don't get too comfortable".
When you wait for the right moment to do something and every second becomes full of consciousness and possibilities, you start to lose the sensation of the "right moment".
Well, I think its a matter of balance, or actually more correctly as Gary Keller describes it- contra balance.
Perhaps its not really about "the right thing" or "the right moment", perhaps its simply about our choices.
To arrive to the point that we actually make choices, that we are actually free and liberated to make them, we need to have all (or at least a lot) of possibilities available for us. How do we do that? By gaining basic and universal tools that can be relevant and applicable in different contexts and occasions.

Now I have a lot of possibilities. I need to make some choices.

photo by Bart Grietens

It started from an idea. From a moment of inspiration that lightened my passion to start to create something.
Its not that first I wanted to create and then I had to think about what to create, but it was more like the inspiration brought this urge to me.
Then, I found the material- the people I want to work with. The people that understands me, that interest me, and that share interests with me.
Then, I turned to look at the ingredients. What is the vocabulary and the language that I want to create and to use in the piece? What do I already have (from the idea itself and from the people) and what do I have to build and develop?
This led me to building some kind of a daily routine that will (hopefully) develop abilities, qualities, expressions and textures that I'm interested in having in the piece.
This routine is not directly connected to the work, but if we will be able to make the right applications, it will serve that goal.
In general this is something that I'm trying to apply in my life- to work and to practice different things that I'm interested at and to create the applications between them. Sometimes its good to separate things, but in the end, if we learn and practice things and then we don't use them its a bit pointless…

So after having the idea (my initial inspiration), the material (people) and the ingredients (physical language), I arrived to the point of asking myself what do I want to do with all this? What is my personal taste in relation to all this, and what do I want to say about it? Or in different words- the choreographic and dramaturgy side of the work.

So to start the work together we started with a very similar process to the process I just described until now. First we got connected to the initial idea that I got inspired from, on top of that we put the individuality and personality, and on top of that we started to create the physicality that comes from all this, with my guidance and my personal taste.

Working and dealing with all these aspect of the process, it became part the process itself.
Everyday we put time to invest in each one of the layers of the process and also time to mix them and let the applications take part.

I think this is what they call PROCESS.


Photos by: Anette Wörner

As the qualities and the layers of the work are getting more clear, I'm busy with thinking HOW CAN I MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE?
How can I create something that can touch different people, from different places, with different interests and different backgrounds.
I need to find something that is common for EVERYBODY. something global. Something universal. something that is beyond the specificity of what I do, and then, when I catch them, I can slowly and gradually lead them by the hand into my world.

Things that we can recognise and connect to are the things that we know from ourselves.
We can recognise when someone is having fun because we know how it feels to have fun.
We can identify with someone how experience loss if we experienced loss.
We feel empathy towards someone who is having a hard time because we know it is hard.
We get touched by witnessing moments and actions that we once passed through.

By understanding and analysing that, I realised the importance of humanity or reflecting humanity through my work.
I need to irrigate the human elements that are anyway existing in the process, and build the work (or we can call it the piece) in parallel to that.
What do I mean? How does it suppose to happen? Well, lets take one of examples that I gave before- FUN. Fun is something that we are experiencing together in rehearsals and outside of it anyway, so why not to bring it into the work?

This way of thinking and approaching brings me (back) to the idea of applications. Why not to use our experiences, friendships, losses, happiness, sadness and all the rest, in different fields of our lives? Why should we separate it? Why would I want to avoid something that can make my work and approach so ACCESSIBLE? Why would I want to have only "dance people" in the audience when I can have different people in the audience?
If the work is directed to the dance audience, it doesn't make sense that T'ai Chi practitioners, film-makers or soccer players will connect to it. But if its directed to people, then people will connect to it.

So how much of the process and the energy should be invested in thinking about the audience? Well, thats a whole other discussion…


Curiosity is being evoked when we recognise something which has something that we can connect to, but that we don't know as much as we want to know about it.
When we can identify with something but we are not sure why.
When we see that there is quality, urge and passion that can be equal to ours, but in a different form.
Same but different.

Photo by Bart Grietens