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00:04:37 00:05:04
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jeremy Wade. Pleasure to be here. I’ll show you my space around here. It’s amazing and plain. You will be able to imagine how […].
00:05:17 00:05:20
[…] a kind of test.
00:05:25 00:05:33
A kind of strange test.
00:05:34 00:05:52
A kind of test for the spirit. Like throwing someone to the wolves. A big old empty space like this.
00:05:52 00:06:00
What are you gonna do? What am I gonna do?
00:06:00 00:06:28
I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna try to find some freedom. Some spirit. Something pretty for you all. Will give you a little description. Will be about what I do.
00:06:31 00:06:47
You only get freedom a little bit. […]. A bunch of gimmicks. A bunch of muppets. Puppets.
00:06:47 00:07:04
When freedom comes it’s like a whooosh! It’s like Ooooh! Give me that freedom, thank you God! Oh, wow! It’s like something special.
00:07:26 00:07:28
They’re pink.
00:08:26 00:08:43
What is the body’s relationship to longing?
00:08:43 00:08:53
What’s the […] frustration has on the body?
00:08:53 00:09:12
How does experience contour and reshape the body?
00:09:15 00:09:25
This is an excerpt from a piece that I made the beginning of 2003, and called Glory.
00:09:34 00:09:51
It was made after a long bout of using crystal meth and various other drugs.
00:09:54 00:10:08
I was interested in the body longing, bending, crawling.
00:10:42 00:10:55
The body, a pilgrimage, a vision.
00:12:29 00:12:34
The naked body sticking to the floor.
00:12:40 00:13:02
Scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person.
00:13:30 00:13:54
The body […]. The body in relationship to an untenable situation.
00:13:55 00:14:38
In the opening scene of James Bond’s Moonraker, a Russian cosmonaut is fixing this space station. Moonraker’s hand enters the scene and clips the cosmonaut’s cord. The cosmonaut floats into deep space. The camera pans infinitely up, infinitely down, infinitely left, infinitely right.
00:17:43 00:18:17
I was fascinated with kissing. With how people lick their lips when they are on XTC. How they grit their teeth. How patients in Belvue on Thorazine would stick out their tongue.
00:18:17 00:18:35
How, if you removed the face from a context, any normal day position, that it became grotesque.
00:18:35 00:19:38
I was fascinated in the dialogue between two mouths, when kissing or having a conversation. The rhythms and layers of sensation in kissing. A kind of nonlinguistic communication. And then: what is the absence of that mouth?
00:19:38 00:19:54
I became interested in the grotesque via… drugs, I think, were the first entrance into the grotesque.
00:19:54 00:20:10
Drugs were my first experience in dancing. I didn’t go to a ballet class or have traditional dance education.
00:20:10 00:20:20
I grew up in a very small town and we went to rave parties. And we would improvise for each other for days on layers and layers of drugs.
00:20:20 00:20:33
Shape shifting.
00:20:33 00:20:40
Cartoon children.
00:20:40 00:20:58
So XTC for me was my entrance into this kind of state change. Since I took a BMC class, I was like: oh yeah, something […].
00:21:14 00:21:19
Different drugs, different properties.
00:22:19 00:22:32
The delusion and the paranoid delusion. The interior and the exterior.
00:22:32 00:23:03
The score might look like doing XTC and your father just came home.
00:24:28 00:24:50
I’m fascinated in the baroque, in the endless proliferations of line and colour, the impossible score of the baroque.
00:24:50 00:25:10
I got influenced while in New York City with the various houses of Xtravaganza, House of Aviance, the various voguing gangs that were present in New York City at the time.
00:25:10 00:25:40
I would just ask them what they were thinking. Were they imagining patterns or various engagements that would unfold through space and time? And they would look at me like: oh my white boy, you’re so white. And then they’d just say: no, I’m just feeling it.
00:25:41 00:25:52
I would say this at the moment is my favourite gesture.
00:25:52 00:26:15
As a child I was constantly working to straighten my wrists. Because I was terrified that if they would do like this, that people would know that I was a cocksucker. So I would straighten them really on top of each other.
00:26:15 00:26:48
But I find this to be so multiplicit: this inability, this kind of surrender, this decadence, these claws.
00:26:48 00:27:31
And if this epitomizes homosexuality, then it goes even deeper when you look at the physicality of those suffering from HIV and on HIV medications for a long period of time. Their bones, they slowly decay. They lose the fat in their facial muscles. The body becomes atrophied. So this stereotype… homosexuality and monstrosity.
00:27:31 00:27:39
Homosexuality and monstrosity.
00:27:39 00:27:52
Homosexuality and monstrosity…
00:31:42 00:31:54
I think, the energy to get into that score is very much about tapping into the nervous system.
00:32:06 00:32:34
Anxiety is a productive state to tap into the tremours and triggers, to inhibit one’s impulse, to work with the behaviour that you see in the audience if everyone were to freeze.
00:32:34 00:33:00
Freeze. I’m just taking inventory of the position you’re in and now change position. Register that change of position.
00:33:00 00:33:39
The internal dialogue that happens where you are in the present, the action and reaction that occurs at the heights of improvisation, a dialogue with the impulse. I like this…
00:33:39 00:34:16
What Philipp [Gehmacher] has set up is a kind of impossibility, but we are more or less obliged to follow through with the discourse, and then there is the possibility of improvisation, of the freedom, of the small freedom within that discourse.
00:34:19 00:34:22
Blink blink.
00:34:25 00:34:28
Blink blink blink.
00:34:35 00:34:54
At the moment, I’m making a piece titled Throwing Rainbows Up.
00:34:57 00:35:18
I was interested in distorting everyday behaviour with various speeds and slownesses.
00:35:18 00:35:56
I was interested in messiness, as in über-virtuosity.
00:35:56 00:36:11
I was interested in bad timing. What is good timing?
00:36:11 00:36:43
Once again, if you take the bahaviour out of its context it all of a sudden seems monstrous.
00:36:43 00:37:17
If you ask the dancers to move in an uncoordinated way, they move in a hypertechnical way, whatever was there.
00:37:17 00:38:39
Moving from different impulses. Moving from your emotions and different impulses. The impossibility of the word creates infinite suggestibility.
00:39:02 00:39:07
Otherwise I’m foaming in the mouth and that’s not so interesting.
00:39:10 00:39:33
So, now that we’re on the subject of the nervous system, I think one of… a very powerful experience for me in school was a visitation by an artist named Joel Ryan. Joel came to the School for New Dance Development.
00:39:33 00:39:37
Can you turn that shit off?
00:39:40 00:40:12
And he is one of the founders of the Institute of Senology in Amsterdam, he’s the person responsible for making the orchestra in a Forsythe performance sound like tigers mating or rhinoceruses running. He’s a brilliant man, he has more PhDs than, I don’t know, a person can have PhDs, but…
00:40:12 00:40:45
He showed me this example of SuperCollider. SuperCollider is a programme, it deconstructs a loop. He explained to us that a loop [or a sample spins as an algorithm in the programme]. This programme shoots multiple trajectories through this algorithm to deconstruct the sample.
00:40:45 00:40:51
It sounds more complicated than it is, because I think we all know what this experience is.
00:40:51 00:41:17
If you listen to Steve Reich and you have two minimal strains and then all of a sudden they clash, there is a kind of spiritual experience, a kind of out of body experience that can happen when those two layers fold over one another. And this is what that programme did for me.
00:41:17 00:41:24
It summarized every drug experience that I had ever had. It took me out of my body for a moment.
00:41:24 00:41:45
And then he went on further to explain how we ourselves orientate the space via sound and our senses. That we can tell how far the car is from us due to how we hear it.
00:41:45 00:42:15
And then more and more he began to talk about the theatre as a nervous system, a place for the magnification of the nervous system, and the infintie possibilities for losing one’s stratification or one’s habit via the play and distortion of the layers in space.
00:42:16 00:42:35
So, for me I will end tonight with a little… I’ve been getting very much into music lately and I will play with this ME50 and do a little sound experiment.
00:42:51 00:44:58
Walk and talk
00:45:01 00:45:04
Thank you very much.