i am in a residency in the north of france, and after a day of rehearsing, i went for a short walk, i was too tired to walk far, so in the field, i lied on my back, watching the sky, the sun started to descend behind the trees, i only could see the clouds above me, coloring from pink to a bluish grey. The shapes of the clouds were soft, no harsh lines. The sky was constantly changing in an invisible process for the eye. Time slowed down. I looked into the colors, mesmerized by thousands shades of pink. I had to think of a dutch landscape paintings, but I was in nature. The transformative sky was totally real. The world draped itself in a huge tenderness and my senses became part of it. No stillness, more a sinking into the infinity of the still light blue sky behind the clouds.

How to share such an experience with an audience when we are performing in the forest. How to make ourselves and our audience sensitive for the magic of the vanishing daylight. It is nice to think and dream about nature as my future collaborator, every time when i am on the countryside now.

yesterday showing of the first material of the forest project. It was in a small studio and we asked the 25 people who came to imagine, how it could work in the forest. We, the performers were very active in showing all what we had done before that week, perhaps we were even a little over active in showing of as possible fauns, but most of the audience was with us, some people thought it was all very masculine what we did, and were waiting for some more feminine qualities- what will come- and even some people were shocked by the violence of what we did, and needed some after talks.

I only can speak about myself because while i embodied my first steps into a faun, i had not so much time to look how the others did.  I discovered that I  liked to play with sudden mind-shifts by falling in and out of extreme vanity, self indulging laziness or absurd horniness. Meeting the others i went for a  desire to bite their flesh, to hit their bottoms and squeeze their bodies. I had fun in investigating this explosively eroticized mythical body. How does a body speak that lives out of the social order of the city, but has its home in the dark forest.

Of course everything i did was naked, since we were still in the studio. training-clothes would have make us immediately dancers, with my naked flesh you still could imagine that I was running around in the forest… as a crazy being.

During the audience talks after our showing the word generosity popped up several times. That is a word, that lately sticks to my work. Everywhere where i perform, there is someone who says that my way of performing is so generous. And now a woman made even a whole monologue about my generosity in being naked. She noticed that in contemporary dance there is a lot nakedness again. And she saw two different ways of being naked. Most of the time there was nudity in an pornographic way on stage, with a lot of play with the genitals, and sometimes one used nudity in a more formal, non erotic way.  She saw my being naked as an act of generosity.

It made me think again why people see me as a generous  performer. Perhaps it has something to do with my attitude in being on stage. Before i do something  on stage, i must die.  What actually means i must lose my self-consciousness,  I must decide that I am not Robert anymore, all what i do has in principle nothing to do with  me, or let’s doesn’t say anything how i live my life outside stage, of course i use qualities which are inside me, but i don’t consider them as my property, it is just the human potential everyone possesses somehow inside him or her. So on stage i consider myself as a speaking and thinking body, a nameless member of a human species, raised in a certain time and place, i even try not to be the Robert who is the professional performer, a person who wants to do his utmost best in what he is doing. So when i do something on stage, I am observing to what happens in my body as if  I am my own spectator.

the second thing is that i must decide before i go on stage,  what i want to offer or give to the audience.  Making theatre, playing something on stage is making an offer to the audience. It is a gift. It is nothing didactic, to let the audience learn something. It is just a gift. something you also like to get yourself once in a while. This time i wanted to give the audience my first investigation in a rough sexual masculine body, that is not censored or bothered by shame. I wanted to give myself and the audience the opportunity to see what can happen with your body when it loses its shame.  To be shameless revealed itself not as an act of provocation, but more as a celebration of having abundant pleasure, beyond social boundaries.

At the moment i write this down i must think of Annie Sprinkle, and her motherly embracing quality in how she shows her desire in sex and in her own sexual body. Suddenly I love to think about how a man would propagate sex and the sexual body in the same way as she did in her performance. Such a man would make me very, very happy i guess. …To be continued

it is tropic in vienna, and i make working days from ten in the morning till three in the night, when you consider drinking with colleagues after a late night performance also as work.

today we have a showing of what we did in the studio the last ten days. but before i went to the station to get an already booked train ticket out of the machine. My fingers were too sweaty to type my reservation-number correctly, the machine didn’t react on my fingers or reacted wrongly, it took more than twenty minutes before i decided to stand in the line of people in front of the information desk. then i had still twenty minutes to buy a jeans, i need one for my coming residency period in france with Maria Hassabi, the next two weeks. In the shop I discovered that my former seize didn’t fit anymore, so that waist size isn’t that stable anymore, or must i say, it is very progressive in its expansion to get larger and lager. I know, I like fat fauns, but why is it always me who has this task to embody it in the dance world, I know I am not that disciplined, and I love to eat with friends, but sometimes I don’t like to look at myself naked in the mirror, as i think i must dance naked on stage. Most of the time i am fine with my body,  it feels good to be in it, or to be it, or to have it, whatever, philosophical standpoint i want to take at this very moment. When I perform or even when I am just with someone, I easily lose my self consciousness,  i hope onecan look at my movements far  beyond my belly.  So our showing today is a good try out…

now i am sitting in a cafe waiting for the others to come, everyone is late, time becomes elastic in this weather.

at this moment i can’t believe in anything and i don’t want to believe in anything. I am working. we just started our forest project in a residency in ImPulsTanz in Vienna. Five male performers in a little studio investigate what a faun energy could mean for them to move, talk, sing, make music or just being present. It is so hot, that we didn’t need any discussion to do everything naked in this phase of the working process. We discover how different we are, and how differently we perform. We need to keep this diversity, i think. But i try not to think too much, and  try to let things happen by itself. Last sunday we visited the location in the forest where we will play during steirische herbst. The shape of the chosen valley made me think of  l’Origine du Monde, the painting of Gustave Courbet. I was happy to see the landscape as one big female body. I discovered that fauns have indeed a very one dimensional way of imagining things and feeling home.

The first week of working is always exciting. Slowly we learn to know each other, there is curiosity in the air, everything is still possible and we first investigate our own desires, before we discover what it could mean for others, for the world we live in.

In the meantime in Egypt, Russia, Tunesia, men are in charge to destroy their own society. In the studio we talk about our first french kisses and in the night i read the newest biography of Rudolf Steiner, and get more and more irritated by the indoctrination of an authoritarian belief. I want to discover what i belief in life, but in no way i want to convince other people to believe in what i believe. On the contrary, in the theatre performances i only want to show how a belief-system works. For instance how a very specific belief-system as shamanism works  in the mind of the performers to create a theatrical reality in 2013. Here in the residency we play with what we can belief about the connection of male sexuality in relationship with nature.

last week we made a little nudist beach at a lake in Finland at one o’clock in the night, now we sing about a dream or vision of making space for a gigantic living erection in nature.