Salon Guest: Amos Hetz
04.09.2011 at Tanzfabrik Berlin
Amos Hetz is a dancer and movement teacher, looking for expanding his movement vocabulary through the use of the Eshkol Wachman Movement Notation and the heritage of the somatic learning. He composes solo dances, dance-collaborations, and movement games. For the last 22 years he was artistic director of the “Room Dances Festival” in Israel.
Amos: “I understand my movement apparatus as a big orchestra of many limbs, in which each limb has its own character. It is calling me to listen to my imagination, as well as to my memory, and to my movement interests that are moving as well. The interest in the small gesture, and in the coordination between the different limbs is the motive behind all my movement activities: performing, teaching and conducting dance projects. I am swinging between the integrated movement and differentiated gestures. This process of moving my awareness from the extremities to the spine and to the shift of weight is bringing me closer to be one.”
Notes from Gabi & Susi, taken during the Salon
Born 1933 – Still dancing
Vexation
Can I say ‘old’ performer or is it rude? old = mature? – young = immature?
Something about time and presence – Something about just looking interesting in whatever you do, because there is some life experience behind it – Something about not being so influenced by others anymore
Vexation
Amos is dancing behind the pillar, choreographing perception, resonance – What do we do when we run out of time here? – Everyone wants to be 27 and wise and beautiful – The perception of time: Is one’s perception of time relative to one’s own age? – Interest in the small, the less – When is an artist old? What does old mean? – The anxiety of not being fulfilled gives the sense of feeling late
Vexation
“I’m already concerned with ageing at 31” – Velocity, speed – is there space for ‘Entschleunigung’? – Still dancing: Anna Halprin, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay
Background
Susanne: I love to see older people on stage, and I would like to become one of them myself. There are several ways to contribute to that. One is that I’m looking for ways and strategies for myself that allow me physically and creatively to keep going performing dancing as a life long practice. Another is that I’m studying the strategies and underlying concepts and ideas and circumstances of older performers who have an improvisational focus in their performance work. Because that is the field I’m working in and know the most of myself, and that is the field where I met the most exciting artists and choreographers. One of them is Amos Hetz. I met Amos through one of his choreographic projects, “Vexations” in which I participated twice (1997? and 2010).
During Vexation I experienced him as an old artist with a very specified and detailed aesthetic and interest, who nevertheless invites performers very different from himself to collaborate in his performance score. And the score he proposed, although tight and rigorous, still had gaps and spaces for our divers choreographic practices. I experienced the whole 12-hour performance, not only as a composition and meeting of all our aesthetics and motivations, but as an active negotiation between all of us. But especially between him as the director and us bringing along our own individual universes.This openness and effort of negotiation and dialogue seems to me one key of how to keep a dance practice alive through decades, through changing fashions and changing artistic values.