Cranky Texte

SOLO 2025 + SLOW RAVE - Evening Program

16. / 17. / 18.10. 2025 Dock11 Berlin

While working on the computer from my couch i double-screen with BBC TV covering the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris. World-leaders arrive and get seated before the clergymen knock on the door and given entrance. My gaze gets pulled into their costumes, capes in white with bold primary color blocks – Mondrian style – i am shocked by their beauty and power. When i show it later to Michiel he says: looks like Castelbajac – and indeed, Jean Charles de Castelbajac has designed hundreds of dresses for the clergymen of Notre Dame de Paris.

Shortly after i get drawn into the live coverage more as the bishop is calling the organ of the church for re-blessing, he does it by calling it for 7 times and the organ player is answering with playing, to my big surprise his playing answering is completely improvised, and he does it in a way that is completely crazy – out of the blue – this striking powerful playful craziness – and the camera is switching to Trump and Musk and Macron and Steinmeier – who obviously are to dull or preoccupied by leading and ruining the world, to let in this extraordinary moment of improvisation.

For me this is a powerful moment live on BBC, power of art and music, improvisational play and spirituality in the middle of the mess we are in.

watch HERE on YouTube

After Cranky Bodies a/company last group piece, VIEW.POINT.MARY and the impossibilities to develop a sustainable ecosystem for a company of independent dancers in Berlin i dug myself into reading new sociology and philosophy writers who work hard on trying to make some sense of the brutal times we are in. I find books of writers articulating post-postmodern culture as meta- or polymodernity helpful and inspiring, looking towards including pre-modern and indigenous cultural code into the oscillation between modern and postmodern codes. Including among many other complexities a search for critical transcendency that both modernity and postmodernity neglected.

Since then i search organ experiences and find the weekly 30 minutes live organ playing at Hedwigs Kathedrale in Mitte every Friday at 16h that i attend regularly.
I also find a composition for organ from Eliane Radigue: OCCAM XXV performed by Frédéric Blondy that i will dance to.

watch HERE on YouTube

The dance will be inspired by following Jacob Storer on social media. Here is the whole story:
When in January 2025 seated in my seat at Berliner Festspiele to see the Trisha Brown Company performing Glacial Decoy, a piece from 1979 with costumes and set by Robert Rauschenberg, Libby Farr, a famous ballet teacher is greeting me from the side, my seat neighbor, who was just sitting down took the greetings as if for him, and a funny who is who game followed. Turns out he is Jacob, a dancer with Ann Terese de Keerstmaeker’s Company Rosas who also performed in Trishas work, and we have common friends, not only Libby Farr, but also Lisa Kraus, my teacher in Arnhem who went to Paris Opera Ballet in the early 2000 to „transfer“ Glacial Decoy for the first time to a ballet company and has written a fascinating blog on that experience that was edited and printed as „Decoy among the Swans“ in the Contact Quartelry Magazine summer/fall 2004.
Jacob and me did not talk further after the show, but exchanged social media contacts and he and his dancing is coming up in my feed frequently. i will refer to this in my dancing.
It is in line with a sensation i had seeing a foto and video on facebook of Marc Crousillat dancing Trisha Browns solo Watermotor.

After my 45 minutes of dancing to Eliane Radigues composition i ask the audience to participate and we will all dance 45 minutes of Slow Rave, a dance score that i developed for the C.A.R.E. Festival in Budapest December 2019 and later published at the GrandReunion website as an open source score:

https://grandreunion.net/slow-motion-rave/

Slow Rave – Score:
It could be nice to start low, lying on the floor, breathing.

Begin with continuous slow motion, when you started you do not stop.

Moving in and out of the floor.

Use weight shifts which allow for travel through space – slowly.

Use the spiral, the twist, in your spine, in your whole body, often – slowly.

Look at each other – see each other – seeing is being seen.

Once in a while repeat for yourself the question
“How slow is slow?”