Dancing to feel alive

(Pavle Heidler & Michiel Vandevelde © Saskia Vanderstichele)

“Why do you dance?” and “What does this Graduation Tour mean to you?”, we asked four of the sixteen students who are graduating from the P.A.R.T.S. dance school. They are currently unleashing their own new work on the public over a three-month-long tour, from Moscow to Istanbul; this week you can see them in Brussels.

Pavle Heidler - Zagreb, Croatia, 1989 
“Behind the sun,” he repeated,
“where everything is everything else”

“Actually it all began with basketball and tennis, sports I played when I was seven. Without much success. My tennis teacher said to my mother: ‘Look, he’s really good at the movements themselves, but he always hits the ball off-target.’ Same thing with basketball! So when my mother and I passed a jazz dance studio one day, I was really keen to go in. And it felt good straight away. A little later I was dancing for music shows on Croatian television every week [laughs]. One thing led to another: at twelve I started dancing at the Zagreb Youth Theatre and at fifteen I was asked by a choreographer to dance in The Rite of Spring. And I was getting paid for it too! That was a sort of turning point…
“What I found so exciting about studying at P.A.R.T.S. was the clear focus: as a performing artist I must, as a minimum, be aware of my bones, muscles, and nervous system. Those are the basics; you could compare it to laying the foundations before you construct a building. Previously I had studied at a dance school in Salzburg: there you learned how, for example, to change the colour of a façade, but I couldn’t find the blocks there to build that façade myself. Here I could.
“This Graduation Tour feels like a surreal moment to me, like a wonderful reward for the work we did at this school over those four years. Coming up with a performance yourself, making it, and being able to perform it in all those different places, it is a fantastic experience and I’m learning a lot from it.”

Michiel Vandevelde - Leuven, Belgium, 1990
G#$*&!/Disagreement?
How to dance things with doing

“From about four or five I did circus in Leuven. But at thirteen I had enough of all those tricks. I wasn’t that interested in circus technique, but I was fascinated by movement itself. Then I danced in a Natascha Pire show for the fABULEUS company in Leuven. At fourteen I already felt dance and theatre were very much my thing, including for my career, later. Why P.A.R.T.S.? Because of its good reputation, and as I watched a lot of dance I came across the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. I saw Drumming with my parents when I was eight; maybe that was a factor, unconsciously.
“Studying here I realised again that technique as such doesn’t interest me so much, although, to dance well, of course, you can’t get by without it. But I will probably never be a very technical dancer. That doesn’t bother me: I’m keener on socially committed performances, somewhere at the intersection of physicality, theatre, and visual art. As I’ve already done some new works of my own, the tour isn’t a great revelation. But it’s pretty nice, alright, to go to Lisbon to perform and have a little holiday at the same time! What I found more exciting and interesting was the working process itself, with four fellow students. Especially as we never really agreed with each other [laughs]. Our show, at the end of the day, became a reflection of that ‘disagreement’. I’ve now done something that I would probably never have done that way on my own. And you learn things from that too.”

(Eleanor Campbell & Louis Combeaud © Saskia Vanderstichele)

Eleanor Campbell - Melbourne, Australia, 1985
“Behind the sun,” he repeated,
“where everything is everything else”

“I was six when my mother enrolled me in a ballet school, along with my big sister. I never really thought about it. It suited me fine, classical ballet, maybe because I was quite a shy kid and I liked discipline. But when I got the chance at the age of eighteen to work in a ballet company in Queensland, I felt something was missing. I found performing ballets so boring and predictable. Then I travelled around Europe and at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna I saw some performances by P.A.R.T.S. students. I thought: ‘Wow, this is “really crazy”, but what does it have to do with dance?’. My curiosity was awakened. In the end, I fetched up in Brussels via a dance school in Salzburg.
“I had categorised lots of things about dance before I came to P.A.R.T.S.. But here I learned to break open that classification again, to unpack my ‘boxes’, and to dare to look at certain structures again. That could be anything from questioning your own views on dance (technique) to the working methods of normal companies and so on. And, in all honesty, I’m a bit confused right now [laughs]. Because there are so many possibilities; the challenge is to find your own course within that. For me, the tour is a foretaste of how our work might look later, a discovery, too, of different theatres and audiences and of the whole machinery around performing, from dressing rooms to lighting technicians. It is also, and above all, an exercise in concentration, as I have to be really focused for our performance each time.”

Louis Combeaud - Bordeaux, France, 1984
Natural Order Is a Special Case & Zeitung/Fragments 

“I was already twenty when I started a contemporary-dance course in Bordeaux. I was studying law at the same time. I had done ten years of theatre in my free time and I was determined to keep doing something creative. I didn’t want to do something introspective, so I opted for dance. It went so well that a few years later I was working with French choreographers like Jean Claude Gallotta for a company in Marseilles. That’s where I first heard of P.A.R.T.S.…
“I decided to make dancing my career because I had no desire to end up in an office doing the same boring, monotonous job every day. When I’m dancing I feel more alive; and I love the searching and unknown side of it… Although there are maybe more risks, in material terms, for example.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of the P.A.R.T.S. training is that you aren’t taught an aesthetic taste; instead, you experience different ways of thinking about dance, as well as artistic work that has been carefully thought through and is the subject of reflection. I have vastly expanded my cultural baggage… I see the Graduation Tour as a platform for being introduced into the professional milieu as an artist, while spreading an image of the school. It is a unique experience: we tour for quite a long time and discover how it feels to perform the same production several times. And to take responsibility for your own work, however it goes, by, for example, learning to cope with criticism.”

P.A.R.T.S. Graduation Tour
20 > 23, 26 & 27/6 • 20.30, €10/12
Kaaistudio’s Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59, www.kaaitheater.be, www.parts.be