| WRITINGS ON WATER
Carolyn Carlson Interview transcript (I)
Master Time Code 00:01:25-00:03.25
Duration 02:00
This project started with the collaboration of the Teatro La Fenice and La Biennale di Venezia. We had a big experience in the eighties here; I created a company in my four years here with very young Italian dancers. They are all consequently now choreographers and great teachers and video artists. So the Fenice asked if I would do a memory of these years in collaboration with the Biennale. So I was thinking of this idea of memory… and then who are we in the memory of the Universe, in Cosmos? I mean what is our connection in this… who were we before we were born? I am very much… attracted to these mystic states that I have often… because I feel like I am from somewhere else… I think this is not unique; I think we all have these mystic experiences. There is somewhere a memory that we come from somewhere else and we are something else other than this Earth memory, this cultural environment we live in…
For the choice of the music immediately I said Gavin Bryars is the composer to support this idea. It’s interesting you don’t know where [his] music comes from and where it’s going, it’s one constant flow… This is the third time I work with Gavin but first time live music, which has been an extraordinary experience… because usually in the contemporary world you don’t have possibility of performing with live music, it’s usually on tape. Gavin has I think there are eleven Italian musicians… and that’s what makes this piece special also because everything is transparent: the music is there at the moment, the dance is at the moment, you see it now and everything disappears.
Carolyn Carlson Interview transcript (II)
Master Time Code 00:47:19 – 00:48:11
Duration 01:52
I had a wonderful Zen teacher when I was in New-York and the test was: you do a gesture in the space… and he says: no I don’t see, it did not stay, do it again. So we would do this for hours, and the precision of absolutely stuck… getting this gesture in space till you knew you stepped back and gesture was still there… I don’t know how long…
But it’s a very nice way of also perceiving life… so when one says something or does something you known it might stay… so you better be careful!
It’s what I call being a spiritual warrior… This is what I teach when I talk to dancers: you are like spiritual warriors, you do a gesture in space, the gesture lasts forever, so you have to do it as if forever.
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