Choreographing for me is organizing movements in time and space.
You can call it moving architecture, you could define it as celebrating your humanity.
The human body is your instrument when you dance.
You use it in its mechanical way, in an emotional way, in a social way.
And in a spiritual way.
And in a sensuous way.
It's so much a part of my life, and of my way of relating to the world.
The choreography 'Vortex Temporum', which is based on the music of the French spectralist
composer Gérard Grisey, was originally made for black box.
It's a sextet for three strings, two winds, and a piano.
Work/Travail/Arbeid is the rewriting of that black box version, for the totally different
space and time of a museum.
The original version that lasts one hour is now expanded to a longer cycle of nine hours.
Things are much more liquid in time, it's liquid movement and liquid space.
And the spectators are somehow part of that.
This is not easy music.
This music is very layered, there is no common beat
you know, the beat is totally exploded, it becomes liquid.
The harmonies are extremely dissonant.
To choreograph to this kind of music, which is of such a complexity, I considered it really
as a challenge.
You know, how do you dance to that?
To match the complexity of that music I took the decision of linking
one dancer to one instrument.
And to work layer by layer.
To put those layers on top of each other, you see different combinations
of people linked to different instruments.
This whirling spiral, this vortex, is the basic form that generated the vocabulary
and it organized the space.
Here in MoMA, it's extremely noisy.
There is an activity of the people which is quite vibrant, quite New York-ish.
But what is crucially different is we go away from the frontality.
Normally when I work I will sit in the middle at the front, and I choreograph from that
frontal position.
Because of this vortex, stemmed from the spiral, I was constantly walking around trying out
different perspectives.
You can come close, you have access to detail, you can eventually go in the middle of the space.
You can sit yourself in a corner.
You are not in this fixed relationship between a spectator
and the performer.
In the last ten years I also started to question the very nature of movement.
Without laws and rules, what helps me to create that counterpoint, to get complexity and readability,
and its still anchored immediately to the music.
What I like so much about dance is that you can embody the most abstract ideas.
Layer by layer, you can rethink the very nature of movement.
That slow work process of constructing the building, is somehow deconstructed in Work/Travail/Arbeid.
And it's a lot of work.