I am hacked and blocked by the boy next door, the man with the whizzkid eyes, i think. And i was allready thinking how to erase this notion of being me. One day before the premiere i must lose my self awareness of being Narcissus frozen in the mirror of the nature.
people act like computer hacking is some big mystery – but actually it isn’t. this isn’t my account but i thought i’d write a post like the author does without much capitalisation. but rest assured hacking is not really robert steijn’s thing. i just wanted to show how easy hacking can be. this is a demonstration rather than anything malicious! this post might look like it is by robert steijn but it isn’t! and by using lower case i’m showing i understand how to pass something off as steijn’s but that isn’t the game here!
Again on line, after a few days of empty prepaid sticks….Three days ago we had our first run: our first reality check with audience, most of them were people of steirische herbst, we showed a very rough proposition of what it can be. We had some songs, dances, acts. Some scenes seemed to work already very well, and also the rough structure in general made sense, but two things worked out quite alarming to me: first thing, my voice was still quite dominant in the total event, because I play the guide of the audience as a storyteller who takes them through the different phases in a journey. The voices of the others weren’t really heard in being in a group together, operating most in communal actions. And a second alarming fact: the only female performer in our crew struggled with her position to express something towards the dominance of the faun/boys band, boasting their sexual powers of having an erection and balls in a lot of songs and actions.
It felt as if I failed in my attempts to make a piece about a more balanced relationship between masculine and female energies within the bodies and minds of us all, and also my desire to have a non hierarchal collaboration seemed suddenly fake and pretentious, when I give myself such a dominant position towards the audience.
In the after talk everyone agreed that it was time to come out of the closet with their own engagement, that it was time to make songs alone, instead of making together everything. So far so good. But I felt awkward and strange. As if I believed in something what I pushed too much to let it happen, and now i recognized that it didn’t happen. I had to go back to myself, stepped a little out of the group process, and tried to reconnect with the forest alone. I took time to find my own trajectory in the event, next to my role as guide. I hoped that also by redrawing myself from the group-process I would leave more space for the others to make something for themselves.
Now four days later, it seemed that we more on the right track again, every one is developing his own trajectory in the piece, individual songs are appearing and also the diversity in moving gets more profiled within a very lose composition of stretching time. It is funny to see, how much it helps to talk about everything thoroughly. I like always to hear everyone thinking out loud about what he or she experiences or thinks in the process, than immediately getting in discussion with each other about what to chose. Still I am founding out how to provide a way of working where everyones desire to do something is respected and also that there is a space for.
Oppositions are: how to give space and time for the landscape when we also must profile ourselves? And how to combine strong ideas about how to make theatre, with beliefs about the healing aspect of a ritual in the forest.
Of course it has to do with a belief-system. I believe that the forest is my friend, a good listener and a great help in making the performance work. I worked already for a year with trees, and of course I am influenced by taking Ayuasca, this hallucinogen of the Amazon rain forest to see the trees as my sparring partner. Others can think that such a belief is superficial, the forest can also be threatening, full of biting, blood sucking insects with diseases.
It would be beautiful when these different ideas about the forest can exit next to each other. Strangely enough I was never in crisis or despair in this production. I still feel it develops it by itself and every time we must rearrange ourselves, how to go on. And to be honest, i feel that i am too old to stress, i just must be creative with what is happening from moment to moment.
Sometimes making theatre starts with very fragile ideas, and how to keep this fragility alive instead of marginalized in the manifestations of these ideas.
I was born when my father lost his job, my mother raised me as a sissy, As a kid i was a little too lonely, so I made theatre pieces with my dolls, As a teenager I tried to do my best, as an adult I was totally confused, I had no other desire than to dance in a club every night, I discovered the power of being in trance just by moving, I fell in love with dance, but because I saw myself physically as very clumsy, I did’t dare to enter a dance school. I became a dance critic so I could see dance performances for free, I retired as a critic when i was 33, and started to become a curator for a long period of years. When i was 43, I gave up the ambition to show my parents that they didn’t have to worry about my financial position anymore, it was the moment after my father died in my arms and he said he was, and would be always behind everything i did or should do. I left the secure jobs as curator and started to dance on stage, untrained, but with a lot of pleasure to show that there are more ways to dance in front of a public. Love and friendship became my biggest inspirations to make work, I discovered both as extremely beautiful and essential in life, but i found out that they also were not that easy to live to the fully. In the meantime I had grown a body of a bear and discovered that i had no discipline in me to go against that.
since i am working in the forest i feel that this biography made me capable to make this piece in collaboration with others. It took time to trust my own intuition, and for sure it took time to give place to the intuition of others.
Every day we start the day by building a construction of branches in the forest, then we move very carefully, inspired by the stillness of the trees. It is our warming up, to get connected with our environment. I listen to the wind, am still amazed by the always changing sunlight through the leaves. I don’t get irritated anymore when the rain doesn’t stop falling and we all get soaking wet.
it seems the heavy days of entering the forest and the collaboration are over, it feels that being in the forest together for a longer time starts to work in us. we start to rehearse songs, movement ideas, we get ideas for actions and I start to improvise with texts, before they must be corrected in understandable german
I hope it stays casual and poetic what we do. We must not overplay the forest. I take a lot of time to get the narratives in a right tone, I am afraid that I am getting too didactic in my words, as if i want to teach my audience something they must know. I just want to stir up their minds a bit by showing them a sense of beauty on unknown places. It is always nice when things fall into place which you didn’t expect before to happen.
The more i work in this project, the more i feel my spine and a potential flexibility to go with the flow of things.
The snake belongs to the forest and shall be listened to. 
