i am on tour in Croatia, performing in Dubrovnik and Rijeka. Till now i could swim every day in the Mediterranean as a kind of warming up/cooling down. In Dubrovnik i stumbled on thousands of tourists, but when we performed there was only a small circle of interested locals as audience. We don’t fit into a schedule of kayak touring and walking on the fortified walls.

Because we go directly to Peggau, after Rijeka, i must decide what books I would take with me to read when we make the piece for steirische herbst. I chose three books, i already read several times, but still i reread them now and then, to bring me in the right mood.

First there is the book of Kazuo Ohno and his son. The personal notes of this Butoh dancer push me always to go for the impossible in my imagination. I really get inspired by his attempt to look with the skin when he is dancing. So to look around while moving you don’t concentrate on what your eyes see, but you imagine the skin as a landscape full of eyes. You can look with the back of your elbow, your thighs etc. This approach forces you to dance as naked as possible. It gets me in a very sensitive state.

The second book is about Shiva, the Indian god, who execute his cosmic dance on one leg. By dancing in this difficult balance, he destroys the way we perceive reality. As a performer he remains a kind of hero for me, also because  I am quite charmed by the way he warms up. He sits in meditation position and he put himself on fire of by meditating on his stiff penis. By doing this he gets locked in an closed circle,he is himself enough, and he closes himself of from the daily world. I think we definitely must try this, even eun kyung, the only woman of our cast…

The third book is a personal report of some Ayuasca sessions, written by an American woman, who tries to describes her hallucinations as precise as possible. Ayuasca is a hallucinogen, a brew made of two roots of trees from the jungle in South America. In her hallucinations she saw often a big serpent dancing and heard also the voice of the mother of all trees. Reading this it brings me back to my own experiences of Ayuasca, and it makes me think about how dance is involved in these hallucinations. In my sessions i became a turkish derwish dancer, drunken by wine and love. I danced through my own veins, and also i saw a tree dancing in my vision. But most of all, my respect for silence was deepened by taking Ayuasca. During the sessions there are a lot of songs, to guide the people in their often frightening mind-traveling.  I always got very high and concentrated from the silence between the songs.  In a way, i try to restage this experience of silence every time when i am on stage. So Ayuasca has definitely  a strong influence on my desire to make a sensorial performance  in the forest. Ayuasca also helped me to think about collaborative environments without any predominant hierarchy.

So these books are really my dance classics, but still it can happen that i don’t look in them anymore, but the knowledge that they are at hand, makes me laugh and ready to work for myself by taking their approaches seriously. What do you want to beleive when you start to make work?