four women in a park in Rotterdam

this evening in a park in Rotterdam
four women took the moment to dance as they would
after a warming up together, the original score was Deboray Hay's assignment of working with the idea of ca. 53 Trillion cells of the average human body at any moment.

they allowed themselves to go astray
to get bored sometimes,
to take breaks in between & then let go into the dance again.
the compositions that they created (subconsciously) were beautiful, full of internal logic manifesting itself. solos, duets, quartets, all in and with-in the park

an act of reclaiming the right to move freely
in public space

I couldn't be more proud

(no photographs taken, not to disturb the hard work that was being done)

ecological dance - extended touch - sensitive energy

after 20+ years of dancing outdoors I gave another class called 'dancing in the park' in Rotterdam tonight. we started with sensing our navels while remaining open to other impressions. then to grounding via the heels, practicing leg-alignment. finally this connectivity was expanded to the hands, head, fingers, toes, crown, tailbone. these 'lines' could be open-ended or closed. at one point i realized that it was my inner organs' motion translated through the muscles & skin when I felt a line to be most open & the movement most 'endless' ...

while I worked on with environmental elements from having taken Viewpoints classes with Deborah Black and the all-encompassing open awareness from Butoh with Rhizome Lee, I finally could get a better sensation of the physical tangible presence of all the grass on the meadow, people's presence further away.

of course this is partly guess-work and highly subjective. but I keep finding it very worth-while to train my perceptivity towards further and ever more inclusive sensitivity, even if it turns out that in fact I am very far away from sensing the actual, ever more remote, tangible feedback from another energy/presence.

Gaia & planetary consciousness : sensible ecology
in two of his novels, Russian-American writer Isaac Asimov described a fictional planet he calls Gaia, where the arriving human inhabitants learned to share their consciousness with each other, and subsequently include all animals, plants and anorganic parts of the planet, no matter how residual or minimal.

I believe that we already have this planetary consciousness right here, but may not be very aware of it, or that it has been too formed into specific cultural patterns that highlight certain phenomena but exclude or won't recognize others. I also believe that, what was named late- and postmodernism in the European-American zone, actually opens up this very cultural zone to such a realization of ecology as a felt and sensible process. (Anna Halprin, Elaine Summers, Mary Fulkerson-O'Donnell, Pauline de Groot, but also Charlotte Selver, and so many others)

so for the coming three weeks I plan to work further on this concept of extended touch as a way to move with and within the entire environment, practicing how I can open myself further and further while moving ...

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

influencing public space ...

it seems con•sens•us is now somewhat of a common good - we've had the politial part live up during Occupy and still ongoing, the decisions about private & public space & rules and regulations for them ...

i keep finding it important to remind myself to listen openly when i am outside of my own home, let the situation and its details reach me beyond my general filter for my perception, accepting the seeming chaos, not having the entire overview, not being 100% in control of what's going on (this can be quite disconcerting yet familiar, even if on the surface it seems that we concede to a system of rules without questioning, the inner chaos remains ...)

these days I am more and more getting involved with the work & legacy of dance-legend Anna Halprin. her husband designed the Keller Fountain in the 1970s, and the aim was to enable more intrusive use by the general public / users of public space, in Portland, Oregon. today such freedom seems almost outdated, we've become so used to being ruled by cameras and police surveillance, being allowed to notice, but not to share beyond very narrow modes of being ...

in May there will be two moments on working on con•sens•us at CLOUD in Den Haag ...
tomorrow during a performance at the finissage of Halloween in the Spring by Vanita Monk in Rotterdam

we'll see :-)

new choreography - taking to the street

as Occupy Wall Street are coming back to the streets, new choreographies are learned, also after the experience of the police brutality tactics of e.g. Denver and Oakland last year.
this goes to show why the arts are such a powerful business and why elites/governments over centuries and millennia have sought ways to limit or eliminate them, most recently with the so-called austerity-measures, but also by taking away free spaces through growing commercialization, devaluation of labour-wages against rising costs of living, banning or re-criminalizing squatting (as happened in 2010 in the Netherlands)
"Our biggest mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again." (from Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale)
the mixture of dance in the streets and politics are reaching new dimensions and fruitition ...
good be with us all

greeting guardian(s) - a score / proposal

seeing a surveillance camera (especially in a public place), look into it and wave at the person looking at you at that moment!
score © 2007 by Thomas Körtvélyessy.


note April 3rd, 2011
here's a corresponding video of visual artist Stefan Hoffmann printing in Phoenix Brighton, UK

SMILE! from Stefan Hoffmann on Vimeo.

breathing con·sens·us | Delfshaven Dans!

Yesterday Thomas Körtvélyessy did a breathing con·sens·us on the Heemraadsplein in Rotterdam, Netherlands as part of the community-dance project Delfshaven Dans! which he does together with Damaris Verduijn and Kaat Nouwèn
Everybody got the chance to start together and tune into each other's breathing, trusting that in time the group would be moving together. It became a wonderfully poetic moment, complemented by a beautifully simple score of Kaat involving small origamied paper-boxes. The Heemraadsplein became filled with beautifully sensitive and touching people, each participant interpreting the score in her/his way.

There have been many moments of con·sens·us in this project, whether consciously or sub-consciously and it was very interesting to follow how they were dealt with by different people at different times.

video recorded & edited by Adolfo Estrada Vargas / cross-dissolve