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K.K.: "What is dance? How on earth shall I answer that question? Else I realize it's actually the same thing as the title of my masters degree which was in title: dance, design & communication. That I think is the best summary I have, because I think formost that for me dance is an excellent way to represent what's happening in relationships in social contexts. I think that the working with the movement arts is a way of really finding a political artistic statement. It has the ability to make a real statement about politics, personal ethics, the way a person behaves and makes choices within a social organisational structure which is politics.
And I think it's design. In the last couple of years I started this subject that is my prefered subject to teach which I call compositional mind, and because I work a lot with partnering and contact I say compositional mind integrating contact and partnering skills. I really enjoy this idea of designing, of making decisions, of shaping the work. I think authenticity is just the most important goal for us to have individually as artists in working with our bodies, but without that design aspect - for me that's what distinguishes professional work from work that is more for ones own personal developement, just persue for that purpose alone. I think that my primary interest is in shaping work for the stage, for performance, where I'm facilitating that people shape their work for the stage."
K.K.: "Yes, because it needs a form. This structure in elements is what creates a more abstract message, creates a meaning on different levels at the same time."
K.K.: "I feel a piece of work is successful, if I wouldn't say anyone understands it, but it produces some change, some inspiration, some experience for people. But I think that work is the most successful when it doesn't need to be questioned: do I undestand it? For me that seems to signify some sort of weakness in the piece or a misalignment. If we have to be asking: what was that about?, then that somehow misses the point, or it's connected to the mind. If I see a good film and it's abstract or if I see a piece of painting and it's abstract or a dance, if I'm moved by it, I'm transported by it and not asking: what was that about? It doesn't mean that I can say literally 1 to 1 or A to A or red to red what that was about, but I can certainly make many stories or some feeling statements of some resonance. There is a clerity of that. I think an uninformel audience is for me an ideal audience, certainly an audience what's used to see cultural things. It should be accessible to anybody. My mother was the greatest audience, she didn't knew anything about dance but she could go: that sections seems way to long or I go a lot confused there - a good piece made sense to my mother."
K.K.: "Political - it's such a grandios word and a grandios concept - for me it's more useful to focus it down to the level of talking about relationships and social organisation. Let's start from that point, let's see how many we have there on stage and that for me maybe is a political statement.
I think it has to do with what the thematical material is and I'm very involved the expression of 'open form composition' or the catchword is: 'real time composition'. I find it more effectiv to think about these sorts of terminologies rather than improvisation. I think improvisation lost it's currency as an effectiv word for talking about this work right now - that's another subject. I feel that we can source from our own personal experiences, our whole relationship experiences and partner polarities. It's useful to start from this intention to build trust to support - I guess there is a german word: 'Betreuung', to be there for, to be taking care for somebody and than to move into the provocation. Perhaps it's useful to shift this person to go to more range, to bring up more aspects of their personality that they are not bringing out. The same thing about relationships - I think it's useful to go into areas of cooperative disagreement and look for areas of conflict, areas of resistence and this is an effectiv means to produce a dramatic tension, working on the elements of story in a very abstract sense. That for me is missing in the typical 'let's perform Contactimprovisation' for example.
I'm not much interested in seeing people just practise a technique, especially when it becomes too self-involved. It's very admirable the way these pieces began about sending gravity but that was also a completely different social context in the 1970ies and 1980ies. I believe we live in a time with a much tider economy. Some of our social and political issues are different. I think it's useful to interlace current economical or socioeconomic environment to be much more consequent on producing a piece thats gonna resonate in the public. We've already dismantle many of this modernistic or postmodernistic esthetic worth or values. We don't need to keep doing that, to keep working in a sense of negation. I think it's time to think more 'reconstructivistly' to consider how we can utilize the tools and the researches that have been investigated for the past 30 or 40 years and re-apply this to making a statement that's cogent.
Personal I don't want to see anymore people paying 15 Euro to buy a ticket to go to see an improvisation performance and walking away going: why do I do that, that was really nothing. I feel that the role of Contemporary Dance is threadend with extinction in a dangerous species, foundingwise and in the Universities. It's not impossible and it could become non-existent and we would be left with historical dance, a sort of museum study. We will have the traditional great works available to be seen, but contemporary research would vanish. It's not impossible and I believe that we have to do everything in our power to be as effectiv and consequent as we can, both in our research and in our shaping work for the stage."
K.K.: "Talking is phantastic between two people, it's wonderful, it's a huge passion. But the human body is our container, it resonates with all what we've done. I like that word 'resonance', I like thinking of it as a container with waves of body states and sentience and feelings and concsiousness going through it. These feelings are somehow expressed in settle postures and in positions. I'm very inspired to look for more distorsion, to push out into edges of - the german word is so nice 'Verzerrung'. Now: when you have two bodies close to oneanother the potential for speaking about relationship is so immidiate, is so powerful, is visual. This is what I miss so much in dancing. I love seeing abstract work, I'm very fond of Wiliam Forsythes work, the old classical pieces. But in the domain that I'm working in - a lot now with partnering and Contactimprovisation and Improvisation - I'm more interested in an approach that relates to physical theatre, in seeing these forms together and giving enough time for resonance of that imagery to come across and that's what's missing also when I see Contactimprovisation presented on stage. So I see the motion of the bodies but all of it's imagery is just being thrown away. I'm very much into the harvest, I'm very much interested to breaking down the choice-making-process and having that being visible. I think that's where a lot of our communication potential comes in.
Right now I'm fond of saying that I work a lot with the notional one impuls and have the domain of work with a couple o'ne touch - one impuls' in which one person is examining all of the ideation, the imagery, the mental process as well as the physical steps between one stillness and another. We break it down to a very simple clear structure that involves change of level and displacement in space. And they are touched just during that process and let go off at just one specific point. For me this has become a study of basic compositional unit. I like the image of this space between a stillness - F.M. Alexander would say a moment of inhibition - which is to recieve a stimulans but to inhibit or to hold back ones response, even while the inner work is going on."
K.K.: "You explore concsious choice rather than just following individual patterns which is what I see in the contact work. People call it improvisation and all are considering to be free. When I watch I much more apt to whitness people just doing the same habits over and over and I'm not specifically talking about those contact sequences going back and force. People develop a lot of habits and I feel that they develop what I call technical limitations which effect then the expressive quality, the compositional quality of their work. For example if someone is always giving over the weight too fast or too much, than people are always backing away and this develops a feedback. Then they get more into expect that and develop a whole system of dancing around that. That's not freedom and that's not developing yourself. It's just doing the same old pattern over and over again."
K.K.: "I've been very consume with the goal or the project of creating a systematic approach - and this is a metaphor that I like or the paradigm that I like very much - which is that of a computer image manipulating program. You have these manues, you can have textual menues, you have pallets, different types of paint brushes or different sorts of patterns what you can insert. You have filters , you have spectrums, you can manipulate spectrums or gradiens. I think these images are interesting to use because these are contructs that help us to hold more information and actually to develop our creativity. So I'm interested in identifying as many of them as possible and making it easy for the student or the dancemaker, choreographer, the composer to hold this in mind while working. I think it's very similar with how an architect works. An architect can't just go off an imagery without considering the vane of circulation, the dimensions of the rooms, how the electrical grid functions within it, the static. The architect is trained from the beginning to think about many different parameters at the same time. I have some background and education in architecture and I find it's still a very useful way of thinking."
K.K.: "I have so many of them. For me it's been a challenge to think about, to write about what different parameters are most useful. One of the first things is to devide the whole range of partnering into two different areas. One which there's a No-Leader and No-Follower, which is traditionally what Conatctimprovisation is using, allthough it does sometimes uses manipulation without really identifying it which is for me a great flaw in the work right now. Then there is this Mover and Partner work which really deals with cause and consequence or cause and effect. I think this is a first devision. I like to examine if you have weight on top, if you have toploaded support, lets look at how many different ways we could do that. So we can have a sack of potatoes, a sack of rice, we can have the frightened cat, we can have these floating of a Hauch, like a breath on top, or we have rooting...
I like to identify all different parameters of the work and give people tools for being effectiv in those different areas. Thats my passion now. I have no wish to give any esthetic direction to them. I'm interested in their esthetics, in their sharpening and clerifying and shaping their esthetic view point. That's what I'm interested to see, what kind of wonderful project, interpretation and uses for the work they gonna come up with.
My job is simply to give them the most effectiv tools and the most clear tools and I have very little tolerance for any more teaching of 'let's just melt to the ground and come back up and feel the floor - I mean I think this is all together too much unconsidered material in todays teaching of Contactimprovisation and Contemporary Dance. I think there needs to be more rigour and more investment to think about what's actually important and how it is being taught. Also in schools I think there's a huge gap between students who are trained to think pedagogically, students who were in danceteacherprograms, where they taught to think pedagogically but they have very little exposure to Contemporary Dance like Contactimprovisation, Improvisation or Contemporary Floorwork. And then people who are teaching contemporary forms of dance, Contactimprovisation or Improvisation have very little pedagogic training. This is a huge problem. It needs to be the infiltration of those time tested concepts of pedagogy to be brought into the teaching of contemporary work.
There's so much great information out there right now and it could be a moment for a big turn around. I'm sometimes sadend to see some of the bravest minds in the performance arts and in dance leaving the exploration of movement research and when I'm teaching in the different institutions I really like to encourage people to stay within the material physical of dance and movement itself. I think there's still a lot of good work that can be produced in that domain, incooperating work from theatre, incooperating many many influences. I think if there can be this marriage between all this somatic approaches and all this authentic movement exploration and the martial art territory, if all of this work - there are so many rich areas - come together in a more focused sense of research for the stage, it's a great hope for a revitalisation of Contemporary Dance. Personal I would be excited to be more excited to go to the theatre."