Today I woke up early and discovered there was a stone in my heart. Not big, not small, but it was definitely a heavy burden. It became difficult to breath. I didn’t know who had put it there, now it was there, it didn’t want to leave. It was a new experience. Once I broke my heart and I heard it cracking. After this, i always said to comfort myself, a broken heart is an open heart. But this was different. Now, there was just a stone, right in my heart.I put my hand on my chest, to get in contact with the stone. Nothing happened.  A stone is a stone is a stone, right in my heart. I thought about the obvious things that block me at this moment. But these thoughts didn’t influence the stone at all. I thought about the fact that stones are old and carry a certain wisdom. My hand started to feel quite comfortable on my chest. My hand likes to hold stones in its palm and also it likes to touch bodies. So it had a very good time suddenly with my heart and the stone under its reach.

Coming back from my one week holiday it seems that I restart the work with different eyes. I found a new energy with which I look differently to the things i make.

Visiting the Biennale in Venice during my holiday I discovered that I still can admire some artists deeply, but that they have no influence on me anymore. The older I get, the more I am convinced that I must follow my own way, wherever it will lead to.

I still can’t find a balance between two extreme art approaches. At one side I engage with politically engaged community based art and at the other side i feel attracted to hermetic mystic often hyper personal work. At the Biennale Jeremy Deller translated his anger about the still existing class struggle in England in a sparkling contemporary dramaturgy of direct imagery and historical reflections. It was mind blowing in its working for a clear community and made me rethink again and again the position of art towards the power-structures in our capitalist society.

However my own investigation in political  issues focuses on the question why the human mind learns to think in a separation between us and the others and how we get used to think in power-games to survive these separations. As i wrote already so many times now, my main political subject is how a patriarchal society influences our way of perceiving and creating realities.

At the other side, I was also deeply touched by the loneliness of an artist who makes work only to be able to survive the world. I  admire the autistic universe of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, the Brazilian Joseph Beuys, who embroidered autodidactic prayers on the sheets of the mental hospital where he stayed as a patient for most of his life. How isolated must an artist operate to create such an alternative way of perceiving the world we live in.

Lately friends start to say that I become more and more a character out of my own work. I think they refer to the fact that I let my beard and hair grow for the performance as a faun and a nymph. They see me as a man who visually becomes wilder and wilder. But how much does this influence me as a private person.

The older I get, the more seriously I use my own mind and body and the words gentleness and grace to create. The borders between art and my life become blurry. But i fear no mental hospital as long as i believe that humping around as a faun in the forest brings a healing quality to me as a performer, director, artist and person.

So, let the faun take over.

I just finished an intensive two weeks rehearsal period with the choreographer Maria Hassabi and tonight my holiday will start in Venice to see the Biennale and my boyfriend. Life can be good, when you don’t feel too guilty about all the work you didn’t do, and still you promised to do. Well after this week holiday there is another chance…

Today i wrote a new c.v. and describing the coming forest project at Steirische Herbst, i wrote that it will be a phantasm about the relationship between sexuality and nature. To be sure i checked the meaning of phantasm in the dictionary, and i was very happy about what i found there.

1. Something apparently seen but having no physical reality; a phantom or an apparition. Also called phantasma.

2. An illusory mental image. Also called phantasma.

3. In Platonic philosophy, objective reality as perceived and distorted by the five senses.

I would be very pleased when we can make a theatre event with fauns and nymphs between the trees that can refer or at least play with  these three different meanings of the word ‘phantasm’.

How to make not physicals things visible by performing very physical?

How many illusory mental images we create in ourselves when we want to say something positive about the force of sexuality and the beauty of nature.

And i still want to work with hypnosis protocols that distort the senses of the audience – like slowing down the pace of perception.

So the new buzz-word for inspiration is phantasm, instead of phantasy. It seems a slight difference, but preparing the piece I like to precise different perspectives.

Last night in bed, with my body captured in the intimacy of the sheets,  I saw myself hanging under an enormous white balloon flying through the air. It seemed that i didn’t want to become very grounded  in this vision, on the contrary i felt like flying higher and higher, at a certain moment I got an enormous overview, but that didn’t seem to be my final desire, i wanted to fly to the sun.  I was afraid that my balloon would explode, in the same way as Icarus lost his wings  when he came too close to the sun. The moment i thought this,  i found out that i wanted to become the sun myself, and it didn’t stop there, i also wanted to become the infinite blue of the sky in daytime and the stars at night. Perhaps this seems a little too arrogant and narcissistic but at the end, this wasn’t about me, i just wanted to disappear and dissolve in the sky itself.

Lately i thought a lot about my father. His body was buried in the ground, but he himself was convinced that God asked him to come to heaven.

self portray of me and my father, people always say that i just look like him, also in how i behave in public, acting like a fool.

DARE TO BE ABSTRACT

LISTEN TO THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY/INSTINCTS AND FORGET TO BE SOCIAL

GO FOR THE INEXPLICABLE

WATCH WHAT YOUR MADE FOR LONGER THAN A FEW SECONDS OF INSTANT JUDGEMENT

NEVER CULTIVATE YOUR POSITION AMIDST THE FASHION OPINIONS OF THE ARTWORLD

NEVER SAY : HE OR SHE LOST IT

HAVE YOU EVER WALKED/TALKED ALONE ON THE PATH OF CREATION WHATEVER THAT IS: AN UNFORGIVEN GESTURE OF A TWISTED BODY OR SOME RED PAINT, COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET AFTER BEING PURPLE FOR SEVERAL YEARS

FOR ART SAKE, DON’T BELIEVE IN ANY AFTERWORLD/AFTERTALK

BECAUSE: EVERYTHING CREATES FORM IN THIS VERY MOMENT

YES, OH YES

MCF = MOMENT CREATES FORM

In my work I try to investigate connections. In my private life I encounter different connections. I love massage as an event in which two bodies meet. I like to be in a state of deep relaxation with some one else , a deep satisfaction of being both in a body or both having a body.

Several years ago I booked an hour long massage in a sauna. It seemed that the hands of the masseur didn’t leave any muscle untouched. It was a satisfying massage. I found myself in the hands of a man who had a lot of knowledge about the human anatomy, and also a lot of pride and devotion towards his profession. He obviously liked to do his work, ad liked to do his best, to do it very well. And he did. When he finished, a little before the hour passed, i asked him if we still had some time. I wanted to show something. He said yes and I asked him to change roles. No problem. He got rid of his shirt, I wrapped a towel around my waist. He lied down on the table. I was standing next to him . I  put one hand on his chest, and the other on his forehead. I didn’t do anything than letting my hands rest on his body. No pressure, not using any knowledge or technique. I just gave him the experience to be in connection with my hands, to feel the warmth of my hands, and perhaps even to feel the intimacy of being not alone in the world, on that very moment. I let time pass by. Several times. Then i redraw my hand and slowly he opened his eye. He was mesmerized. He said he had gone to sleep or lost consciousness. He never had such an experience. We embraced each other, he even kissed me goodbye.

A few years later I went to him again, he was happy to see me and said that he learned a lot from what my hand had given him. He integrated this experience in his work as a masseur and he thought it made him a better masseur.

Last year I had a two night stand with a man when i was on tour. The first time,that our bodies met – it wasn’t a night, actually it was a late afternoon – we took a lot of time. He was a huge man with a beautiful big body, who obviously wasn’t  at ease with his weight. I asked him to lie down on me and give me all his weight. He did so. We didn’t move for a long time. We were breathing, sensing the surfaces of our bodies. Slowly I felt that he got more and more relaxed and that his weight entered my body.I had to let go of everything and concentrated on the weight.  I fell asleep, perhaps i even lightly snored, when i woke up, he was clearly awake, almost ecstatic, we still hadn’t move. We started to exchange some information and thoughts about our lives, gently, curiously, the atmosphere was still very peaceful. It was indeed a beautiful man.

Yesterday I got a text-message, that after our meeting he decided to work with the body, and now he is a licensed Reiki masseur and he also learned to give tao and tantra massages.

I am not a masseur, but because of my work as a performer I like to experiment with what my hands or body can do in stillness. We don’t need always our genitals to get intimate luckily. Thinking of the forest project I hope my faun won’t limit himself to a belief in the almighty dominance of the cock but also will play with other body-parts.