Two days ago I discovered that there was a concentration camp from august 1944 till april 1945, very close to the forest where we work. The prisoners came from Mauthausen and were forced to work in the caves of Peggau. Now on the place of where the camp was, there is a memorial for the people who died there. I started to read more about the camp on the internet and for the coming week we meet someone of the village who has the official archive with more information. The road, on which we bike every day to go to the forest is the same road as the prisoners had to run every day to go their work as slaves, hounded by their guards with whips and rifles. The villagers who saw them pass every day were not allowed to make contact with them.

Images of horror entered our minds. The trees have seen it all happening. The molesting, suffering, dying, the power abuse and sadistic acts.

Last night i wrote a text for the performance that deals with us being in a forest so close to such a dark past. How to give respect to the victims of fascism in a performance that wants to attack a wrong idea of masculinity. A power thinking that is based on a separation with the other, generates automatically a repressed society. Fascism, Putin, the Arab world, we see so much examples of this kind of masculine thinking. But i see and experience it also in my own body and mind and in the way I live. And I see it back in how we deal with our environment.

But will people understand this political side of the work when they come to see the show. Or will they see me as an artist, who can’t look further than his own struggle with masculinity and his place in the world in which a certain way of power thinking exclude automatically minorities and abuse automatically the natural resources – let’s say the gifts of mother earth.

It is a little awkward to explain the value of making this kind of work, two weeks before the delivery of the performance. I hope the performance itself won’t need any explanation. The most efficient reality check will be the performance itself.

Today it rained for the first time, since we are in the forest. So in the morning we rehearsed in the hotel room, singing lyrics which still are looking for some sense, playing guitar, playing the  trumpet and making loud noises in between, i am not sure how long the guesthouse will tolerate this improvised rehearsal space.  In the afternoon it was fine, just a little drizzle, nothing more, so we walked our usual trajectory. The sky remained cloudy and grey and it was a kind of dark in the forest. We saw a total different environment and discovered that when we do not walk slowly, we hardly feel the magic of being in a landscape together with trees and plants. So we really must train ourselves to slow down a bit, it is better not to talk too much and for sure it is good to be not too decisive when we enter the forest. otherwise it is difficult  to get a more sensorial response to our environment.

Last night I dreamed that I could see through people. I heard what they said, saw how they behaved, but at the same time I understood their biography, got a grip on their inner motives. I asked in my dream if I also could look into my own biography, because it is difficult for me to know my own inner motives. At that moment I saw a big serpent rising in me, the snake filled my whole torso. I felt very strong when I woke up and tried to restart the dream again. So i dreamed the same situation, now close friends came into my dream, and again I could see what drove them in life. It seemed that this drive was always somehow hidden, something invisible as if there was a clear other reality behind the activities of our daily life.

I like thinking of being a snake. It fits the forest project and today it gave me a certain power to stick to my own way of being in dialogue with the forest at moments when I was overwhelmed by all the possible directions the event can go, since all the performers are here now, and come with their way of thinking and creating. The challenge is how to keep the diversity alive without losing the own identity at a moment that the performance is not yet in a state that it starts to speak with you. When that happens, you can let go more easily of your initial ideas.

I like to transform my physical snake dream state into a mental snake state in the performance.

on my travels i make small exhibitions of favorite artworks, here a twig from the forest combined with a postcard of rudolf stingel in palazzo grassi, with the photo printed carpets and a painting of frans west in his younger years

yesterday we arrived in Peggau, and today we went to the forest. In the morning with the forest-manager, in the afternoon on our own. we looked with the forest manager to the locations where we want to perform, and immediately there was a big action, cutting down some dead trees to open the space a little. he was sweating and we were carrying big logs: our first material to build something. In the afternoon we went back to the now more open space and did a kind of openingsritual to start to work  by telling each other everyone’s wishes for the coming three weeks in the forest. i closed my eyes and listened to the different content and voices in combination with the ever present sounds of the waterfall. After these monologues each of us did a small movement solo in front of the waterfall. We looked how everyone dealt with the task of being in dialogue with the environment. I was happy. Instead of getting into discussions  about what we want to tell the audience at the end, we first try to let our different bodies speak for themselves.

But to let it speak, first we must listen to how the body reacts to the environment, what kind of desires get awakened. How does the body get more alive or how does it get silenced in the forest. My body acted directly very sensual, more than i wanted to admit myself.

Looking at the others immediately a lot of information popped up about how things work outside. When you want to be perceived as in dialogue with the landscape, you must limit your own actions to give space to the movements and the silence of the environment itself. A shift of light, by suddenly having a cloud for the sun can only work as meaningful, when you give this unexpected change some space to be perceived. We must train ourselves in doing as less as possible. By being present, you can already intensify the perception of the landscape.

Today a friend wrote me a long email about the act of putting yourself on the path of zen : “he does nothing, yet there is nothing he does not do”.

Instead of putting all our energies in inventing nice situations and imagery for the audience, first we must discover what the forest does to us personally, and not only as performers, dancers, poets or singers. Although these are our personal media to communicate.

The forest- manager said that the forest works as a mirror, that you change by just doing nothing while sitting under a tree for a long time. We became friends, and he promised us to take us on a hunt, one for one, because his spot to look at the wild animals is very small.

Tomorrow i will take to sit under a tree. I will try to listen, look and smell and also observe what that does to me.  I have indeed a very nice profession. I want to make a dance for the trees as audience.

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?