It seems like this, it seems like that. What is seen from the outside, what is felt from the inside, what does the outside eye see of the other individual? The inside of the individual dwells in the darkness of the outsider’s eye. Even looking into a mirror, one cannot see what is inside of oneself. We can feel and have a sensation of what is going on inside of ourselves. We carry thoughts, images, emotions, feelings that are residing inside of us. How do they relate to our outside, how do they relate to what we do, what we say, our movements, our shape and our dance?
I am infinitely obsessed by what we can do as human beings, how virtuosic we can move, how elegantly we can speak, how graciously we can dance, how fast we can run, how high we can jump… Hamlet utters in act II that he admires the human for his infinite capacities in form, movement and action, like ‘an angel in apprehension’, ‘the paragon of animals’ and even like a god; Shakespeare gave him that reflection which I undoubtedly relate to.
Yet, my appreciation would disappear if I would solely see the shapes and actions of human beings, without a sense of inner world presence; they would merely be like shallow tricks and cosmetic behavior. When I cannot detect the presence of that honest inside, I feel a loss of agency. The realm that is close to the individual itself, the inner world of the person, that fragile, yet immense powerful inner world which makes every person unique and authentic is to be given place to exist; I am equally interested in the presence of the outside ánd the inside.
Hamlet’s solemn black clothes, his ‘windy suspiration of forced breath’, his eyes that host a fruitful river are examples of shapes, forms and modes that aren’t the ultimate signs of what he is inside. Similarly to Hamlet, I am not satisfied with solely the form, the shapes and the modes of doing, acting and dancing. I am deeply interested in giving space for the inside and let it exist in the form. The (outside) form can be completely different from what is felt from within, but that makes it only more interesting; giving agency to that difference between the outside and the inside. We should never deny what is going on inside of ourselves; the outside shapes manifested in physical movement and speech are containers for our inner world. To me that mission of giving agency to the relation between both outside world and inside world, is carried by both the choreographer and the performer.
The visual abstraction of a circle residing in a square is the most accurate description of the concept of the relation between inner world and outside form.
It was clear to me that Joost wanted to dig into the inner world of me as a performer and to not only work on materials or form. I observed him using different methods to create space for me to allow my inner world to exist and to express myself from this true state.
It was a sunday when we met the first day in Portugal and we used this day to see what expectations we both had of the work. He introduced to me the idea of writing each other Choreographic Love Letters every day, to know what is going on in the mind of each other regarding the work and inner feelings. The first days he had me underlining certain words of my letter and from these words I had to write a new letter, talking about how I felt in the moment. He was always very critical, telling me I was describing but never really sharing what I truly felt. It took me time to understand the difference between describing my feelings or truly sharing them. In the beginning I thought I actively had to do, or change something, but over time I realised it was the opposite, I actually just had to be.
One day in the studio we were working on the scene of wilt and he made me do it over and over again, telling me he did not believe what I was doing. I did not understand at all what I had to change in order to make him or anyone believe in my performance and got really frustrated. In the middle of the scene I kneeled on the floor and put my head in my hands, not thinking about what I was doing but simply not knowing what to do anymore. I stayed down on the floor, almost crying until he put the music which was the queue for the next scene to start; in an impulse I got up and stepped into the state of the next scene. Joost stopped the music and told me that was great, he told me he completely believed me and we moved onto the next scene. He left me with more questions than before; I was sure he would be annoyed because in my head I had just given up, but instead this was what he was interested in.
Every time when we were working on the honesty of the inner world, I had this experience of ending up with many questions. In the first week, the practice of each morning was him asking me to share and perform what was going on inside, I did this but again he never believed me. The practice took almost three hours every day and one day we changed the rolls. After doing that, he asked me if it created some clarity and I could not really answer him because I only had more questions than before.
I believe one of his methods was to constantly ask me questions, to make me think, which made me constantly observe and question my inner state. It created an awareness and honesty of my inner state which I did not have before and certainly was not able to share this with others or express it in such a vulnerable way.
Creating a safe and trustworthy environment were fundamental principles of Joost which allowed our process and this work to happen.
First coinage of the Square and Dot concept as a note while reading Hamlet (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1992, Wordsworth Editions Limited).
When I was reading this, I understood Hamlet's utterance upon the lack of compatibility between people's perception of him and what is truly inside of him. The people around him define what he is by his visual appearance, actions and modes of behaviour; but his inner world remains invisible, unseen.
Through the reading of these lines, I felt an emerging relation between Hamlet's words and my process of research. As a note I drew a square with a dot in the middle, as an illustrative abstraction of the relation between the outsiders perception and the individual's inner world.
Is this an indication of what madness is for me? We could say that madness and mad behaviour in its slightest form is unusual, not commonly accepted and unexpected behaviour. The unseen, misunderstood or non-perceived inner world of the individual could help me in my archelogical process of finding madness in the body.
Psychologist Eric Maisel theorizes that the phenomenon of madness is the manifestation of inner worlds that have been built up over a substantial timespan, a phenomenon of indwelling; a guiding or activating entity from within. (Maisel, 2014)
Similarly, but from a Christian point of view, author John Owen gives a commentary on the Bible in which he illustrates the sin of indwelling as a residing energy in the heart of man; indwelling sin is madness and is situated in the very core of human kind, in the heart of the individual. Madness, indwelling sin, has its seat inside of the body, it has its root, rise and spring from within the body's heart. He describes the manifestation of madness as 'opening up the vessel'. I would like to propose here that the action of awakening, the allowance of acting from within, from the middle or the core of the body, is giving manifestation of the relation between the inner world and outside form. It is the proposal of the performer being in the here and now, embracing the formative container of the choreography, the text and action, as well as giving existence to his inner world. It is the generous act of sharing the relationship of the square and the dot. It is, it appears.
Jerzy Grotowsky in a 1980 interview, at his birthplace in Nienadówka, Poland.
The way Grotowsky speaks about the honest inner inner world of the individual relates very well to my interest of tension between the inner world and outer form. The outside is the form of the body and the (constructed) context of this performer's body, where the inside is the very moment of 'what is'. I am interested to 'wake up' the inner world of this 'what is'. Where Grotowski refers to this state as sleeping without dreaming, like the Buddha laying on his right side at the moment he is entering into Nirvana, I like to refer to it as a state of 'waking up', the awakening, LIKE a lively dream. We are speaking about the same phenomenon but explained 180 degrees around. When I work on this state of allowing the inner world to live, I am able to think, reflect with my body and with my senses, I can find multiple crossed interrelations between theory and poetry and images and equations. Space turns into a ritual place for me, music is felt as materiality and the body becomes the interface between the inner world and formative context.