The intensity of moments when you don’t have a choice, when other things decide for you, like falling in love, or the second before the accident that has to happen; suddenly they appear, with no introduction,[and are] important for me because of their extremeness rather than for the significance to be given to them. The decision to use this as a basic material for a theatrical composition is at least a paradoxical challenge, considering a theatrical event as repeatable and controllable. Perhaps when all is said and done, the body doesn’t remember either and everything is a subtle illusion of luck which helps to define or exhaust the game.
When I was twelve, my friend said to me, “I’m going to become an actor.” And I thought, “Really? I still want to become a farmer”. Now, I’m more busy with this [performance art] than him. I’m a creator. I’m in touch with everything, I never specialised in one thing. I know about photography, about film, about dance, and because I am not focussed only on one thing I can combine many things to create a show. But what made me think about dance was that I loved to perform. I was a very strong performer and I had a sense of what I could be. The only audition I’ve had in my life was with Jan Fabre. So when I stopped working with him I realised that I couldn’t go anywhere else. I had no technique so couldn’t go to auditions. So then I decided that I would make a piece for myself, and I started to collect ideas, to write, to read, to study more, to meet co-producers and to meet some musicians.
I met Thierry de Mey and Peter Vermeersch, and I knew the piece was going to be called What the Body Does Not Remember, about instincts, about what is not thought, about the reflexes that people lose, about the alienation of human society. Where people living in a city of a million would come home in the evening and say, ‘nobody touched me, nobody affected me’, and it made me wonder where we were going. If we needed our instincts to survive we would die because we don’t use them anymore. I was fascinated by what the body has to do, without having a choice. Where the survival instinct has to return, using our instincts and reflexes, what the body has to do to find its way out. It’s good to work with risk and that’s mainly what stimulated me. At school we only went to see one or two dance pieces, and they felt so fake.
For What the Body Does Not Remember I wanted to do something where the necessity of the movement is understandable for the audience. And so, of course, in the piece when we came to throw the big stones, you realise that a movement has to happen, otherwise there will be an accident. So the intensity is more important than the meaning. The intensity of what it provokes. People don’t over react and play the drama, the drama is in the movement. You hit someone without the desire to kill them. You go to hit, and the other person tries to avoid it. It’s like playing the game with an open flat hand on a table and stabbing quickly in the spaces between the fingers. It’s a game. And, why?… because when you trust each other, you can do it. But you play with the timing – and so you avoid each other, a clash or an accident. In movies it’s all fixed and choreographed; here, it’s also choreographed, but it’s more like an action movie.
It’s like throwing a stone or stealing something, or avoiding something, the split second response that’s needed. That was the preparation and how I worked. Then I cast people in Italy and we had a workshop in Belgium. We went to Spain, where I worked with a group of people from 9am until 9pm, seven days a week for three weeks. Some people thought that it was impossible but I was determined. Fabre had been really tough and I wanted to be very extreme. Because it was difficult to get space some weekends, we went up onto the roofs of the cultural centres and spent 12 hours rehearsing by the fire escapes. That gave us an amazing creative force. I still had a strong connection with Fabre, and I knew that I needed to move away from that or I wouldn’t be able to survive independently. And in the end I managed. I didn’t work with anyone who was connected with him. As a result I have built up something that is very different, and I have learned new things, including how it is possible to make something with little knowledge. I had no technique. People think that to make work you need to be a choreographer and learn technique and choreography, but I never studied that. And that’s lucky, or I would never have made What the Body… in the way that I did. I would never have had those crazy ideas of throwing stones or frisking people. It inspired a lot of people afterwards.
Belgium born director, Choreographer and scenogragher, Wim Vandekeybus founded his company Ultima Vez in 1986, creating his first production What the Body Does Not Remember with music performed by 11 musicians that amazed the world of dance of the time. In New York Vandekeybus and composers Thierry de Mey and Peter Vermeersch received the prestigious Bessie Award for this ‘brutal confrontation of dance and music: the dangerous, combative landscape of What the Body Does Not Remember.