Jakarta: on the last night of the Indonesian dance festival I am sitting in the audience watching a triple bill of two Indonesian choreographers, Jecko Siompo and Eko Supriyanto, and the South African choreographer Vincent Mantsoe. Maybe this is another turning point for me during this tour. It is a moment of for once watching other artists on stage rather than performing myself. I think about the festival that made a choice to put those artists forward, their curatorship on the one side of the auditorium and the belief feel in the expressivity of ones own medium on stage. The three works are distinctively different and performed with great conviction. A multiplicity of styles on one evening that seems to say: it’s okay to be different as long as we put ourselves forward completely – no hiding, little doubt.
This evening makes me think of my own fears, questioning and generalising then some European and my own tentative notions of possible straightforward expressions in my dancing and the verbal language I use to describe it.
I realise that everything I describe in our talks is always multi-facetted, complex, polysemic, pluralist. Every physical movement is more than just one thing. Maybe here lies a cultural difference between my work and the language about it that I keep sharing on this tour. I feel neither for or against complexity but notice how reluctant I am when interpretation of the work seems too one-dimensional to me.
