Electric

In the midst of packing and printing maps to Zürich, and rather grandly ignoring St. Valentine's Day, and reading bits of Jung and von Franz – and, not least, despairing over a hideous eruption of lint all over my best black jeans, which I'm trying to fix late into the night – I had a note on my calendar that there was an important dance performance tonight. Looked it up online: Twelfth Floor, choreographed by the sadly late Tanja Liedtke, with members of Adelaide's fabulous Australian Dance Theater and DV8...

well, I thought, okay: I still have hours before I have to leave, I must go see this.

It was amazing (as was Australian Dance Theater's Age of Unbeauty and Birdbrain; and perhaps as are things by DV8, though I still haven't seen them, or their videos, yet). It's got brutal and dark stuff in it, and is in the unhappy context of an institution (suggestions of psychotic rage, schizophrenia, fragmentation, chaotic sexual/violent responses, oppression). But the range and intensity of movement is so incredible, the sense of space and complexity and wit and power....

I really love this kind of stuff. As I said to a friend – and, though it sounds overstated, I think it's pretty much true – the truly great dance experiences I've had in my life have been either Balanchine/Stravinsky or ADT. Styles extremely distant from each other, it's true: but both of them have that astounding expansion of visual/kinetic imagination; they both show me entire worlds I'd never even thought of. In fact, I tend to have an instinctive feeling in these contexts, as with theater or music pieces that are really amazing – that if only this complex, extended, fascinating awareness could go on forever, life would be worth so much more.

Oh, and there were some nice small connections: Anton and Kristina Chan, and probably others, were in some of those previous productions, and I'd spoken to them in those past years; and Anton even remembered who I was. And my friend Tim, the actor/dancer whom I pushed a bit last fall to get back into teaching, was there – he's now doing workshops locally, which is wonderful (and implies a swifter success for him than I'd expected even at best); and he loved it too, and left full of ideas.

BUT: now, of course, I must get back to packing, and go off to study a world of the psyche, of power, of beauty and fear.

But it seems clear that this wasn't an interruption on the way....

Comments

[Dave Robinson]

And if we could just WAKE UP it would be like that for us.