(Wherein I reveal what I’ve been biting my tongue about for months…)

Dasniya said (perhaps in August), “The Opera in Brussels are interested in me doing some Shibari in a performance next year…” Some months pass, maybe two. I’m wondering if my knee will have decided that it enjoys being attached to my leg or not. “… The director is Romeo Castellucci.”

In the course of my life in dance, there have been three people thus far who have drawn me to themselves as if I am ensnared in a net. First was William Forsythe, for whom on the basis of a mere couple of hours as part of the audience in a theatre, I left irrevocably changed and quite clear as to what I would be doing from then on. That it’s likely I’ll never work with him is less important than the overarching influence he has had on me; indeed I sit here, under snowed in Berlin in no small part because of those hours.

Next was Jan Fabre, whom I stumbled over in a video while in DanceWEB in Vienna. While it’s unlikely anything again will have the effect on me of Forsythe, watching Les Guerriers de la Beauté shoved me forcefully along a direction I’d been blindly seeking. As with Forsythe, I may never work with him, but the influence upon me underlies what I do now.

And then … Strangely I have never seen a performance from him. The only time I was in the same city, I arrived too late to obtain a ticket. But the images, the short videos I’ve seen, what I’ve read, the ideas – not simply of what appears on stage, but how it all works together in life – Romeo Castellucci is someone who has affected me greatly.

So now I find myself with Dasniya – and Gala, as well as Jorgos – getting ready to spend some weeks in rope. Wagner’s Parsifal and Klingsor’s castle garden, Romeo, two months in Brussels, and performing in La Monnaie. Perhaps I shall write during it also.