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00:03:58 00:04:02

The good news is the clothes stay on.

00:04:07 00:04:10

I speak for myself.

00:04:16 00:04:44

So. I’m very glad to be here. I’m very glad that you’re here. It’s very nice to open this walk+talk series. It’s a bit of a celebration, I think, to start.

00:04:44 00:05:07

There is a lot of things in my head. I forget them easily. So I brought some papers to help me.

00:05:46 00:05:49

Bon…

00:07:10 00:07:15

There is two stories I want to tell for the beginning.

00:07:35 00:07:59

When I was twenty, I went to Barcelona. I had a favorite bar, which was not much more than a kind of facade, where they made shakes, fruit shakes and coffee.

00:07:59 00:08:20

Across this bar, there is a little square and I’m sitting there, I’m enjoying a coffee or juice, I don’t remember, when there is something that catches my eye.

00:08:20 00:08:59

There is a man, who’s begging, and it seems like he’s falling asleep while he’s standing there. He’s smoking a cigarette, which is just in his mouth, and he’s holding up his hand. He goes really slow.

00:09:17 00:09:36

While I’m watching, I realize I have a camera with me. And there’s something about his movement that I find so intriguing that I decide to record it.

00:09:36 00:10:13

As he’s going down, at a certain moment his cigarette falls out of his mouth and he wants to reach for it, but while reaching for it, the money that is in his front pocket falls out as well. And as he’s trying to grasp all of that, he kind of slips through to the floor.

00:10:27 00:11:00

I’m sitting there and I start to hear around me kind of rumours of people saying things. And at a certain moment there’s two police officers coming towards him, asking him to stand up again. But from the moment they’re gone, the same thing happens. It goes extremely slowly.

00:11:00 00:11:28

People say things that I can understand, something with calling an ambulance or… And at a certain moment, a woman next to me asks me what am I doing, and she says that I better stop because the men next to me are getting extremely angry.

00:11:28 00:12:00

So I stop this camera, rolling, and afterwards I really don’t know how to feel about this. I was aware of the misery of that man. And I probably also had this sense, but somewhere I lost a kind of bigger picture of it and I decided to just record that and cancel all the rest, so…

00:12:01 00:12:17

A second story is, I went to the beach when I was sixteen, for the first time, with three friends. We had the appartment of my grandparents. And we rented a go-cart.

00:12:17 00:12:32

Now, the beach of Oost-Duinkerke is not that long. It is probably like 100 metres or 150 metres. And the time that you drive up and down takes probably less than 5 minutes.

00:12:32 00:13:03

So we’re four cheerful, sixteen-year-olds in a go-cart. And I’m the first one who can drive. So I’m driving and it’s kind of fun, but after a while it gets a bit different and my mind starts wandering off and I come to the point that I see, let’s say, a five or six-year-old in a really small go-cart.

00:13:03 00:13:19

And I’m thinking: it was so nice when I was that young, but I always wanted to have an automatic one. And basically, I never was allowed to from my parents or they never wanted to pay for it.

00:13:19 00:13:44

I thought at that moment: if we would give this boy a really little push, it would be really nice. But that was absolutely not. It was the worst idea I ever had. I learned that I shouldn’t trust my intuition.

00:14:24 00:15:08

I’m thinking about Patti Smith. There was some footage that I saw, where she’s probably still in her twenties or maybe early thirties. And she kind of overcomes this point of being a man or a woman. She’s just kind of embracing the cosmos of sexiness.

00:15:08 00:15:32

She’s so powerful that even, I don’t know, twenty years or more after that I’ve seen this image, I’m still totally nailed to the ground by it. I think at that moment I could have married her.

00:15:37 00:16:11

I started to be really fascinated by what is going on in music. And I decided to make a solo about that. And I got really lost. The basic point of it was that I wanted to uncharge a lot of energy and try to get that into the audience and from the audience back to me.

00:16:18 00:16:23

I’m roaming.

00:16:27 00:17:00

I came to this point that I realized that I never finish a thought or… a movement or a task that I put to myself. And it goes as well that direction as it goes back and front. And sometimes it really, really frustrates me.

00:17:00 00:17:21

So that moment, that I keep on going around. And I’m searching for something that will crystallize me, become clear, sometimes doesn’t come.

00:17:21 00:17:44

I sometimes look for it in weird places.

00:18:30 00:18:32

Sorry…

00:20:33 00:21:00

Ladies and gentlemen! I did this before!
I know it doesn’t lead anywhere!
And the best is yet to come!

00:22:29 00:22:47

Okay, there is a point that I was in the metro and I had been going to my transition. I had to go one stop.

00:22:54 00:23:19

When I go down, I notice I was in the second stop. And I go the stairs up, I search for the other entrance to go down, I take the next metro and I notice I’m again in the same metro, going the same direction, away from where I have to go.

00:23:19 00:23:30

So I get back in the metro, go back two stops, take the other metro, and I notice I’m again in the wrong metro.

00:23:30 00:23:40

I’m not here, I thought. I’m not here, I’m roaming.

00:23:42 00:24:10

There is a kind of… link that I put towards performing and it happens to me that I’m performing and I lose connection with the here and now. And that’s a pity.

00:24:10 00:24:27

In a way, the whole experience should be that I have a conversation with you. So if I’m not here, then you’re not here.

00:24:37 00:24:45

I wanted to talk about desires.

00:24:45 00:25:05

The desire to… to move and not be afraid of other things that are happening.

00:25:05 00:25:39

I can think about all the education I had, all the teachers that gave instructions how to dance. And I remember looking at my classmates and thinking: how am I ever gonna do that? So, with the result that I didn’t dance for six years during my dance education.

00:25:39 00:26:04

So, after making a couple of duets, in which I explored the wonderful world of slapstick, I came to a point that I think I should follow this other desire, the desire to move and to dance in a very lyrical way.

00:26:04 00:26:29

Allowing myself to go to places that I don’t dare to go if I think about the hundreds of different side dots that can appear. And just to be here.

00:26:30 00:26:50

I was afraid of music. I was afraid of music because I think that it takes over. Something looks really fast good in music. But I have a desire to dance on music as well.

00:27:24 00:27:29

This is a weird feature.

00:33:18 00:33:20

Thank you.