Page 72 - PIP

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I.S.: What does it mean to you to share the performative space with another artist? In 'Now and Then', what was the impact you and Christina Ciupke made on each other? And how did your individual engagement change by coexisting on the stage?
J.L.V.: Before 'Now and Then', I wasn’t particularly interested in collaborations in which two choreographers create a piece together. Perhaps because I feel I don’t have enough control over the process. When I work alone, relations occur between myself and the work. And in collaboration there is a third instance, myself, the work and the third person, which makes things all the more complex, but also open. Collaboration is something I have always found very interesting during the creative process, but the moment final decisions have to be made, the collaborative method might become rather tiresome for me. At least, that was my experience before my collaboration with Christina Ciupke, who taught me this could be different. Unlike me, Christina creates exclusively collaboratively and has extensive experience in that field. The way she listens, discusses, considers and navigates different dynamics during the collaborative creation process was a very rich experience for me and I learned a lot from her.
However, it is important to explain how this collaboration actually came about. When I was working as a dramaturge on Uri Turkenich’s 'I Love My Dancers', who was exploring the politics within the work process of Pina Bausch, Christina was working on the project 'Undo, Redo and Repeat', which also focused on dance history. We often met and discussed our separate processes and the dance history topics that occupied us. Here we planted the first seeds of our future collaboration. A year later Christina invited me to make a project together based on our conversations. We decided to focus on the moment in history when contemporary dance was born. It was in the early 20th century, during an extremely tense period: in almost all spheres of human society the foundations of contemporary society, as we know it today, were being laid. We kicked off our research with the Monte Verità community,