LOVED OBSESSION by tom mustroph | published in neues deutschland 30/07/2011
one evening, three choreographers, five fantastic dancers.
the atmosphere which is created through the saggy female body, which seems to be put in motion only by the force of gravity, external force applied by the man and the resistance of its own body tissue (andrea schiefer) and the dynamic and aggressive male body, which gets stuck again and again while trying to overpower itself (michael loehr) is remarkably dense and eerie at times.
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THOUGHTS ON INLAND by michael loehr | published in tanzraumberlin 07-08/2011
,we lull ourselves into the illusion that theres a place outside for extraordinary people‘ - birger sellin
my piece deals with the vastness of our inner landscapes and the urgency and simultaneous unability to communicate. it is inspired by and contains excerpts from two very strong books i came across in the last year:
first - ,i don’t want to be inside me anymore’ by birger sellin. autistic handicapped. mute since early childhood. author.
birger sellin has mastered a language, but is incapable to use it. in his twenties, he finally learned to write, to communicate, but only under supreme physical and mental effort and only through the support of a helping hand [facilitated communication]. when reading his texts one can feel how much he struggles putting letter after letter, agonizes creating words and sentences. and at the same time, there is always the question, if those words were truly determined by himself or subconsciously affected by one of his supporters.
after I finished reading birgers‘ book i couldn‘t let go of this physical picture it left behind: this conflict between willpower and inability. this question, if or how much his bizarr and poetic texts were lead or even controlled by someone else.
so, i put the book away. i didnt want to do a piece about autism. i thought (and still think) that birger‘s texts are strong enough all by themselves; they don‘t need a stage.
a while later, i discovered a second book, ,dear everybody’ by michael kimbal, which is a collection of farewell letters written by a fictitious suicide victim. letters to the protagonists’ first big love, to his violent father, to his wife and later ex-wife, as well as to the easter bunny. a book full of unsaid things, which once again leaves you as a reader with a feeling of urgency and helplessness.
slowly i recognized that we all might face inner conditions which vary in form and intensity, but can be related to autism.
if i had to rethink working on this subject, it was clear to me that, according to all constellations within both books, the piece would need to be a duet. therefore i went to the studio with my long time colleague andrea schiefer, whose physcality and ruthlessness has always fascinated me and seemed as a perfect match for this project.
so how can we dance this subject? self-evidently not at all. how can we avoid facing all of our attention only on ourselves which so often happens in contemporary dance? how can you transport the atmosphere of both books to the stage, but without repeating what has already been written? so most of the time during the research process we questioned, how far can we distance ourselves from the books‘ characters and form something new with relevance for the viewers.
our goal was and is to keep the essence of these books, but to transport this enormous need to communicate into a language of movement and to search for equivalents of motifs such as urgency, density, failure, barrier, resistance and manipulation, into our bodies; to wake our own memories of helplessness, of inner fights, of being stuck; to multiply this feeling and release it all again.
INLAND is neither about an autist, nor a suicide victim. it’s not about me either. though, i have to admit that i feel helpless and insecure most of the time. as we all maybe. so it seems to me sometimes. though, INLAND is not looking into the inside, it tries to look from the inside to the outside.
