excerpt
Introduction
Jeroen Peeters
(p. 8-9)
How does a choreographer like Meg Stuart create work? Even for interested audiences the creative
process remains mostly inaccessible and the dance studio a foreign space. In interviews one catches
a glimpse of an artist's intentions, poetics or world-view, of their life maybe, but artists are seldom
addressed as makers. Though one might be familiar with someone's artistic vocabulary or universe
as conveyed through performances on stage, this world appears differently when it is still
in process—under construction, so to speak. Driven by intuition and a dark object of desire, a creative
process will never be fully revealed in words, the resulting work never fully unravelled, yet
mystification seems to be out of place. After all, a choreography or a performance is the outcome
of a process of making—the making of ideas, material, formal decisions, social interactions, and
so on. If such a thing exists at all, does the work perhaps have its own intrinsic discourse? An
exploration and documentation of a creative process might be a good place to start, hoping that
the languages of making will follow.
Between November 2004 and January 2006, from the audition workshop to the opening night,
I immersed myself in the creative process of Replacement, spending long stretches of time in the
studio to observe the rehearsals and talk to Meg Stuart and her collaborators. It brought up even
more questions. Each piece has a specific subject matter and cast, but each also requires the
invention of its own process, developed and shared by a group of collaborators in continuous
exchange.The studio is a space brimming with language, from tasks to discussions and chatter,
all of it charged with the flustered energies of exploration and creation.Yet, can one discern there
method and language that exceed project-specific interests? How to address the more encompassing,
intuitive and practical set of guidelines that has grown over a career, yielding articulate
decisions regarding the composition and dramaturgy of a piece, the social energy of rehearsals,
performance strategies, and so on? It concerns Meg Stuart's artistic genealogy and history of collaboration,
which is sedimented in embodied poetics—and in her case hardly shared via words,
not even in the studio. So how could I bring Stuart's poetics and method, her implicit language of
making, onto paper?
Rummaging through the archive of Stuart's company Damaged Goods, I collected existing materials
related to her work, such as performance texts, notes written by Stuart for programmes or
subsidy applications, videos of lectures—mostly bits and pieces, fragments and anecdotes, betraying
a reluctance to use language. It was elsewhere that I discovered a true accumulation of discourse,
embedded in the work: in the tasks and fictions that make up the many exercises spoken
out loud by Stuart in workshops.These exercises have gained structure and clarity over the years
and, due to the pedagogical context, appear unburdened by the haphazardness that characterises
a creative process.They highlight the narratives and principles underpinning the work and reveal
aspects of its construction. Carefully transcribed and organised into a manual, the exercises of
Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods are at the heart of this book.
In the wake of the exercises, the studio dialogue became my main tool for further documentation
of Stuart's way of working. Over the course of five years I conducted about fifty hours of
interviews with Meg Stuart and (former) Damaged Goods collaborators to discuss issues of the
work in relation to processes of research and creation, training and performing, dramaturgy and
collaboration.Though Stuart's pieces from Disfigure Study (1991) to Maybe Forever (2007) were
touched upon in an oblique way, these dialogues sought to revisit meaningful moments in Stuart's
artistic trajectory, mapping out genealogies and collaborations as a way of drawing different lines
through the work. In this book, they have been reworked into a virtual polylogue of singular voices
and counter-voices circling around the same moment, concern or theme.These voices have thereby gained density and focus, but their tone and phrasing remains close to the informal language used
in the studio—they appear in quotation marks in order to stress their oral source.
The insistence on an internal perspective upon Stuart's work is a red thread throughout this book,
which also embraces essays and visual contributions by several Damaged Goods collaborators,
each one first-person accounts addressing aspects of making. It thus extends the overall vision to
encompass a variety of perspectives, different approaches to writing and visual impressions.
More materials are rubbing up against the juxtaposed views and voices: a selection of documents,
performance texts, quotations from other artists that inspired Stuart, as well as photographs from
the pieces. All of it adds up to a space that is crammed with substance, a container brimming with
memories, projections, reflections and images close to Stuart's choreographic practice, a heterogeneity
of materials that have a certain gravity of their own and, hopefully, won't cease to resonate
and stir up new questions for future work. The composition of the book happened in close collaboration
with Meg Stuart and graphic designer Kim Beirnaert.
Are we here yet? doesn't come with a map or a table of contents, but invites the reader to take a
walk through some of Damaged Goods'conceptual landscapes.You can enter anywhere, acknowledge
the place you are in by holding onto the materials and giving them time to resonate, then
navigate on your own as soon as you feel grounded.You could go to page 129, land in the studio,
tune into its energies and work your way through the rumble and jumble of the creative process.
You could read from cover to cover and follow a choreographer discovering her own movement
vocabulary, facing wider choreographic concerns, embracing collaboration, meeting foreign languages
and going into the world, gathering question upon question.You could empathise with the
identity struggle of performers becoming transparent, inverting a suspicion of words, or morphing
when challenged by technology.You could slip into the all-embracing fictions of costumes or
a cinematic reality on stage, and discover improvisation strategies that aim to outsmart the threats
of a suffocating totality. Or you could take this book into a dance studio, go straight to page 154
and work with the exercises, letting the tasks slowly overwhelm your body.
Are we here yet?
Brussels and Berlin, October 2004–December 2009
