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I had the first idea in 2013. We were at a residency at BUDA (Kortrijk, Belgium) for dreamed apparatus and we were preparing an event. Many people helped and gave advice. Kevin Decoster, the curator of the cinema program of the art center, was among them. He recommended that we watch a few movies. One of the short movies proposed by Kevin was Tango by Zbigniew Rybczynski. He described it shortly as: “A lot of characters in one room. A classic animated work, all about repetition.” Indeed this movie interested me a lot and I thought immediately it would be great to adapt it to a performance, with all the interesting problems that would arise from transforming a work of video collage into a live art form. At the time I didn’t think I would really do it but four years later I decided to make this work. In the mean time I became very interested in the notion of rhythm, and as I was reading Nietzsche and Dorian Astor, the concept of the eternal return interested me very much. “What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’”
The ideas of 'Tango' and the eternal return came together and it made sense to create this work, neither a copy of an original idea, nor a completely new thing. I was interested in the fact that it was also possible to work with an existing idea, and not necessarily produce new ideas for each new work. In the rehearsals, we sought various different ways to repeat our actions, not like machines, but like humans: going through the same track over and over. How to repeat our actions, while keeping their liveliness.
As director Peter Brook said long ago, “boredom is the devil”, and repetition easily produces boredom. We were therefore looking at ways to find liveliness within the repetition. I wanted to create the work in Berlin with a group of 15 professional performers. Then, on tour, eight people from the city of the venues would join seven people from the original cast. We would always have a week to recreate the piece. This process of recreation was also repetitive. We were repeating the creation of the piece. On a larger scale it was also a reaction to the touring situation in contemporary dance, and performance. I had toured a lot in the previous years and I was tired of this way of relating to places; arriving the evening before the show, performing on one or two nights, then going as fast as possible to another place, or back to Berlin, to save money, to save time. There was too little time to really encounter the realities of those places. We would have only a few hours to walk through the city center... I wanted the 'Eternal Return' itself to include an exchange between people from the city and the dancers on tour, so that we spend time in those places and we have a life together. As the piece also speaks of society, it was necessary that the people of the city would bring to the work their special way of being, formed, in part, by their location.
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