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DUE TO TECHNICAL REASONS THE VIDEO TRACK OF THIS RECORDING IS MISSING FOR THE FIRST THREE MINUTES.
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For the next forty minutes, I will try to talk from a place I am not used to talk from.
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I love to try things out.
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I will not talk about this dance I am dancing now.
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I will rather talk around it.
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Two weeks ago I felt the urge of dancing.
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I guess it was because I spent many days in a row talking about dance,
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talking about what it is to work as a dancer and about issues that relate to this topic.
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I realized that my practice as a dancer had become more of a discursive practice.
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By discursive practice I mean that in my working days I spend more time talking about dance than dancing.
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I am not a singular case.
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I think a lot of people in the dance field spend more time talking about dance than dancing.
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It was not like this when I started to dance professionally at the beginning of the 1990s.
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I am not saying that this was better.
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But at the moment I experience this as an unbalance and I would like to spend more time dancing.
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I want to spend more time exploring what dance can do by dancing, not by talking.
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So, as I said before, two weeks ago I felt this urge of dancing and I went to the dance studio and danced.
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Ironically, after a couple of minutes I started to think of this walk+talk and I tried a couple of ideas I had.
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I danced and talked at the same time and I imagined you, the audience, on one side of the room.
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I tried to address this side of the room while dancing and talking, but something strange happened.
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My body refused this frontal relation between me and this imaginary you.
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I felt flat like an image.
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I felt like I had only two dimensions.
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I kept on trying to address this side of the room, where I was imagining you,
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but my body kept on avoiding this frontal relation as an attempt to find back its three-dimensionality.
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It was somehow an unbearable struggle.
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I stopped.
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After this quite confusing experience I met my boyfriend and a dear friend.
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They are both dancers and choreographers.
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I told them what happened and they both told me to use my problem for this walk+talk.
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I decided to follow their advice.
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I love to start working on something by addressing a problem.
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A few days after, I thought of what were the strongest experiences I had as a dancer and as a spectator of dance.
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I thought of how much I love to dance in a club on techno.
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I don’t like to do this in Stockholm.
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The clubs close too early, people get too drunk and keep on bumping into you, and in most of the places you cannot dance topless.
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I love to do it in Berlin.
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When I am there, I often go to my favourite club and dance for ten, eleven or fifteen hours with very few breaks.
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When I dance like this for so many hours, it is a very intense experience on many levels:
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perceptually, bodily, emotionally and even spiritually.
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There is something I particularly enjoy when I’m on the dance floor.
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It is when I find someone whose dance really appeals to me.
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I dance close to this person,
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and after a short time we are both acknowledging that we are dancing together.
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It is not about doing cool moves together.
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It is not about doing a cool choreography.
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It is very different.
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It feels like this person is dancing inside of me.
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And it is reciprocal because I also feel that I am dancing in this person.
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It’s like inhabiting the body of someone else and at the same time being inhabited by someone else.
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Or maybe it’s even more, maybe it’s something like possession:
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Being possessed by someone and possessing someone at the same time.
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This is not about power or domination.
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It’s more about accessing another reality,
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but maybe this sounds a bit too paranormal.
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In our dance jargon we would probably say it’s kinaesthesia,
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but I think that this word is somehow reductive and doesn’t encompass all what I experience in this situation.
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Sometimes I experience something very similar when I’m watching a dance performance.
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I look at a dancer, and it feels like this dancer is dancing inside of me.
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Sometimes I also experience something like I am inside the body of this dancer and I can experience her or his dance from within.
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Another strong experience I have as a dancer is when I have sex with another dancer.
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I experience something very different than with someone who is not.
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I’m not saying that it is better, it’s just different.
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If I would try to analyse this, in a maybe superficial way, I could say that
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it’s maybe because dancers are used to a quite high level of bodily intimacy in their work and that this might be the cause for a particular connection.
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But, I guess it’s more than this.
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Somehow it feels like dance is becoming sex.
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Again, it feels like dancing into each other.
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It is a dance without a choreographer.
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Ultimately, in sex, in life and in my work, that’s what I’m looking for.