“The Shift of Focus” is your new group piece after a trilogy on collective bodies which you developed between 2014 and 2019. In the past four years the social body has been unprecedently hit by wars, pandemic, ecological catastrophes. What was your driving force in starting to work on a new collective piece during this time?

I start from a practice of Zen, in the widest sense – which implies of course a practice of movement and of being with one another. But what does practising Zen – practicing recognition of oneself – mean in a world full of crisis? The question is always where healing can begin, where we can do something that makes sense, something that matters, on a larger scale. In my case, or our case, what we practise might not change the world on the level of big external results, but it might make sense to ask where sense-making can begin. So, practically, we come together for a daily practice in which we study the self and how we can take steps within ourselves. We look at inner processes first, which might then create the condition for a larger-scale response.

As a first step we need to be fully there – where we are, where everyone is. And there’s always something else there too, a mirror of yourself, a reflection. Which at times can extend infinitely. So, if we think about Zen practice rather than forms or techniques, it means that studying the path is studying the self. Our perception of the world is subjective; it isn’t the world itself – just as there’s no one truth - but our perception of it. This doesn’t mean that reality doesn’t exist, but that we see our own perception of it.

Taking these questions into making another group piece demands great openness towards what can happen. If every step and every moment the things we do/perceive can change, the work we’re making can become a slippery ground of transformations and perceptions, and this demands everybody’s full attention to every single moment. This slippery ground needs to be anchored to something solid. In our case is the score, the choreography with its three parts The creation of the world, I got a dream (on infinity) and The balance of power (between destruction and healing), which in the wider sense could be seen as a response to what’s happening in the world. In a very open, maybe also dreamy or poetic, fantastic, abstract way. But it can also „only” be seen as an opportunity to be fully present, as a reason to be there, fully there where we are. So in a way the score is a trajectory for practising being fully present, infinitely mirrored by one another, changing our realities moment by moment, breath by breath, layer by layer, motif by motif, movement by movement.

“The Shift of Focus” is part of a long-term project of yours which aims to create three different formats analogous to the three classical genres of visual art: still life, landscape and portrait. This piece is inspired by the genre of the landscape. What’s behind this idea of transposition?

I see my work at the boundary between choreography and visual art, where movement – with its coherent perceptions and transformations – is formed and treated almost like sculpture. Working with one person on a solo corresponds to the genre of the portrait; working with a group of people is equivalent to the landscape. In this piece everything needs to be formed as a sculpture. Everything that’s part of the landscape – which is the floor with its tatamis, the flying panels being an extension of the floor to the sky – then the physical work within and between the performers, their voice/breath and sound, light and colour (projection). The difficulty is to see how all those elements at play become ONE. How they contribute to the ONE sculpture, landscape and (fantastic) journey that we send viewers on. On top that the stage apparatus is very relevant again – as much as in Reflection, which was the first work commissioned for HAU1. There I saw no other way than to work with the stage apparatus, as HAU1 is not at all a neutral black-box theatre. It’s a character, and for me it also symbolizes the power we face in the world, be it the power of nature (our planet getting more and more destroyed), the power of war, of a machine gun or any kind of weapon, or the power structure within society, down to the power of bureaucracy keeping us small.

Differently from “Reflection”, it’s now the vertical axis that interacts with the performers, through strings which they pull or are pulled by. The panels fly up out of view or come from below, just as if we could reactivate the big notions of heaven and hell; just as if we could refer to the ten thousand archetypal figures and stories told over and over again; just as if the Kleistian marionette theatre would come alive again. The vertical alignment somewhat represents the answer to gravity, which is life.

One day master Gerhard said at the end of a class: ‘isn’t it fantastic that it’s lightness which is the answer to gravity and to life.’ It was such a simple conclusion to a complex class that day. I found it really enlightening.