Crowd

How did the idea for Crowd come about?

I spent a few years researching The Rite of Spring, which was very inspired by Russian pagan rituals. There were many things that the Paris audience could recognise in 1913, when Nijinsky, Roerich and Stravinsky premiered the work, but the audience were also very offended, because this type of dance was not supposed to be in a theatre on the Champs-Élysées. This displacement of popular culture in a bourgeois theatre was very shocking. I think it’s very interesting to focus on what we recognise globally as high art and low art; what is the hierarchy of arts, and what is the meaning behind that.

With Crowd, I was looking for a celebration from the late 20th century, early 21st century in Europe. I decided to focus on techno culture because I’m very interested in alternative cultures or countercultures. These spaces, where new generations try to invent a new world, these are the most alive places to me. In these countercultures, or street cultures, there are amazing choreographic inventions, amazing ideas, it’s creative in so many aspects. House, hip-hop, krumping, voguing, all these extremely smart, sophisticated, great ways of dancing that would not be considered high culture, end up being adapted by the mainstream culture and emptied of their original content. High culture and popular culture should be in dialogue, there should be no hierarchy.

What is the importance of time and emotion in Crowd?

Time is very central in the work. Crowd tries, in a formal way, to unfold the experience of the layers of time that exist in the experience of the present. The past is not somewhere in the past. The experience of past is present, it is a moving entity. The anticipated future is present, as well. How can I imagine a choreography that unfolds this overlap of all these different layers of time, visibly in the present experience of the performance? You can see an overlap of rhythms in Crowd, from the music, to the light, and in the choreography itself. You can perceive rhythmical overlaps, through the space, music, lights and bodies, all of which creates different layers of the experience of the present time. Dancers can be in different qualities of rhythm in one moment, or they can stretch, condense and edit the time in the chronological unfolding. Understanding the experience of time in the present time is also questioning perception.

I think it’s a very emotional, sensitive piece that also deals with how emotions can change our perceptions, and our perception of time. Sometimes one moment can be very stretched, sometimes a long moment can be very condensed, following the logic of the sensitive perception of time.

Crowd is also an investigation of emotions, from very sensitive to very loving, to very careful, to very funny, to very playful, to more self-reflective, to more hard or violent. I think it’s very interesting to consider that emotions are changing your way of viewing things. If I’m calm, I see things in a certain way. If I’m angry, I see them in a different way, my attention is focused differently. Likewise if I’m in love… Emotions have a strong impact on the way we perceive things.

I love philosophy, the philosophical experience comes from the body. For example, if I’m upset, I need to understand why something feels wrong. I have a physical input for thinking. It’s very important to be able to express emotions, to be upset, to be angry, to be hurt, and to understand that these are important and meaningful reactions that are part of the thinking process. The body and emotions are the roots to thinking. They make me think, make me move. Moving is choreography. That’s why I think choreography is such an amazing thinking place.

What does Crowd tell us about love and desire?

When I feel in love, I have another type of awareness of my surroundings. Crowd investigates the physicality of my perception of love, this super precise, stimulating and sensitive awareness that comes out of love. The slowness in Crowd reflects very much my feeling of love.

It’s a very powerful topic, to understand how sensuality and desire are encoded, and it’s also political. We can see how capitalism builds up a strong desirability for capitalism. Capitalism has created industries like Hollywood that make miserable things desirable. Art, architecture, choreography, so many disciplines, can work for the desirability of a political system. We have a huge responsibility for where we create desire, what it means to create desire in this place rather than that one. The body, the choreography, the dancing, the whole desirability and sensuality that goes with the experience, are key experiences in the political system. We work on desirability that aims for intelligence, equality and respect.

How was the casting and training process for Crowd?

The casting took over two years of workshop auditions. I was looking for very open minded, talented dancers because, for most of them, I use different ways of moving.

I work with Anja Röttgerkamp, who knows how to train people in the technique of moving fascia, helping the dancers to be grounded and move globally. We also do meditation and specific exercises that work on different rhythmicalities, the quality of the movement, and that help tune the 15 characters in the same quality, because synchronicity is very important.

For 23 years, we’ve been developing a vocabulary of retouched movements inspired by movie editing techniques, special effects and human avatars, like puppets or video game characters. This vocabulary includes the slow-motion quality of movement that is very specific in Crowd.

We also exchange ideas and stories, constantly adapting the work over time. Even if the piece seems the same as when it was premiered in 2017, many things have changed, on all levels. It seems to me that a performance is like a growing plant, a moving body that we’re taking care of, feeding with physical practice and exchange through discussion and questions.

The other quality I was looking for is people that are very respectful and kind, people that are very good in a group. I wanted to create characters based on archetypes inspired by memories of my time in Berlin. It’s a very personal piece for me, a personal experience of music, space, love, and friendship. The casting was quite subjective. I wanted to work with people that reminded me of these past and present stories. These personal memories work also as collective memories.

How did you create the characters we see in Crowd?

We worked on a story for each dancer. They would start to write stories themselves and then we worked with Dennis Cooper. It was a collaboration. Some stories are closer to their lives, some are more distant. But they are all custom-made.

I also thought a lot about the costumes. We tried to make them fit the dancers from a sociological, emotional and narrative perspective. Everything is somehow very sensitive and close to them, but also fiction. The audience doesn’t need to know what is personal or fictional. That’s what I like about fiction. It allows you to be very intimate and to keep your intimacy at the same time.

It’s a very intimate piece for the performers, but I also hope to make a piece that’s very intimate for the audience. I often hear from the audience, that they recognise their own experiences and feelings in Crowd, that there is space for themselves, for self-reflection. When you’re watching Crowd it touches your body as an audience. I hope that Crowd can be a personal story for everyone, a story that can be approached with personal memories, desires, wishes, and become a very intimate experience for all of us, a different experience for all of us.

How did the music and choreography come together?

I worked mainly with Peter Rehberg but also with Stephen O’Malley. As the band KTL, they wrote some original music. With Peter, we also worked on the music selection, the DJ set. Peter had an amazing knowledge of electronic music history and a fabulous library. It was also very important for us to quote existing music with a significant place in electronic music history – from Manuel Göttsching to Underground Resistance, the Detroit scene. There is also a lot of information in the music in terms of colour, dynamics, rhythmicality, politics and history, so it has a major influence on the choreography. If I consider the piece in a pure musical way, then choreography, space-design, light-design, is all part of the musical composition. What is the sound and the music of the space, of the light, of the choreography, of the clothes, of the colours? Every expression can also be analysed from different perspectives: music, choreography, philosophy, politics. I need to analyse all these aspects in all the mediums that are composing the piece. It’s all co-related. In my working process, I need to constantly shift my way of seeing to be able to get different viewing angles.

How does being a woman affect your work and the way that your work is received?

Being a woman for me is a cultural construct. I cannot identify myself with this because the way a woman is thought of in our cultures is degrading. However, I’m recognised and was raised as a woman. This social construction has a huge impact on my life. Through my work I try to move away from the restrictive, violent shape of normativity.

I’m very lucky to be where I am. But the inequality of resources is still shockingly unfair. In Sao Paulo, with Crowd, we did the opening of an amazing festival on a big stage, and they said, “Oh, you’re the first woman doing the opening of the festival!” But if you want to see women on big stages, opening festivals, they also need to have the resources to create these large-scale pieces. I’m still an exception in my field. I manage to be self-confident enough to say, “Yes, what I do is meaningful” despite my doubts. My social surrounding also helped of course. Many women don’t feel this confident.

As a woman, I had to impose myself to be where I am. This space was not given to me, as a woman. I do it with humour, though, as it’s so absurd, and with rage because it’s so unfair, but also with lots of joy because it’s such an inspiring place to be. I really hope it can be encouraging for other women, that it can help them feel they can legitimately take more space in arts.