new "con·sens·us" - after 10 years and more of working (a personal note)

today I did a con·sens·us solo at Gallery Karin Trenkel in Rotterdam during her series Eyes & Ears (Oren & Ogen) about dance & audiovisuals / video-art. it was the first time in a long while that I worked as a soloist and on my own terms. the performance became amazing. I was able to combine the refined, sensorial concreteness of feeling my way through the accumulating dance, as well as an entirely new level of inter-personal relating. it made me think of Gertrude Stein, one of my all time cultural heroines, and how she had at the beginning of the last century struggled to free written words from associations, and how in writing "Tender Buttons" she found this whole area of nouns and how she could play with them ...

I started lying down in the gallery as I usually do, sensing my body, giving it space & time & attention to do what it felt like doing. I could let my environment impact my moves & create a sensorial bond at the moment: pillars, pipes, windows, objects, lines in space etc. while this bond had been always nameless in the past, this time I could combine it with giving it voice-names in my mind, without loosing the sensorial clarity. I then decided that while until now I had always made my moves out of the moment and myself, remaining idiosynchratic, this time I would seize the chance to translate what I was seeing into imagery / energy / referrals for whoever would be watching the performance.

once I went outside, I could suddenly get to yet another level where I also was able to open up on a personal level, and let my heart remain alive & open while doing my dancing. the experience of the Ball I had performed at last Sunday, the Black Grapes, in Rotterdam, second edition of the growing Vogue / Ballroom scene in the Netherlands. the emotional level of daring to be just myself and personal, which got an enormous amount of support from becoming a Radical Faerie, came to a fruitition with the above and I felt I could be the complete master of my dancing and at the same time really have everone participate in their very own way and as they chose. truly a miraculous moment.


Thank you all who brought something into this moment, from the very first con·sens·us partners to more recently, Kaatje Nouwèn & Janine Brall (click here for the photo gallery) Damani Leidsman, Gerwin Luijendijk, Amber Ambiance Vineyard, Micki Prodigy and Karin Trenkel

all photos ©2013 by Gerrit Jan Fukkink, used with kind permission