It’s over. Saturday night was a breeze, no second night wierdness, and Sunday just went. It’s getting stranger and stranger every night, and when my finger is up Radovan’s nose, then searches for his mouth, ummm… There was even video from inside hell, courtesy a camera from Emile, so video and a new section on zeroballet will happen soon. But in the meantime, Radovan has started flogging too, which means there is now a constant self-referential blizzard of internet stuff happening from everyone in hell. In case you missed it, Emile is flogging here and blogging here, and Cornelia, from whom most of the photos of hell have come from, and who is a genius with a camera is flogging here. As for hell, more soon, but after the show was much wine drinking, pulling down of all the lights and the usual post-show clean-up followed by a sojourn to Schloss Emile for more wine, kasse, brot, and mmmm … drooling even to think about it … Turkish Kebab.

Premiere, opening night, make-up, hair, bikinis, an almost proper warm-up (a couple of pliés and running through the Botticelli section), then plenty of hanging around in the dark studio waiting for Emile to give us the sign, yeah that sign. I managed to slap Cornelia a good one right on the mush during the strangling section and almost fell out of performance mode because I thought I’d busted her lip. From then on though, actually the whole 12 minutes of death-grind-metal-ness was a scream.

I like keeping things a bit under-rehearsed so performing becomes like somewhere to keep playing and try new things, which was always one of my problems in the distant past, of supposed to be getting it right dance, and my head is going, “hey! why don’t you try doing … this! (completely change the choreography and cause minor disaster) and see what happens?”, but now we all get to have fun and play on stage which is the best thing ever. And Emile fully rocks, not that I really see what he’s doing but I heard from quite a few people how awesome he is to watch, and I think he has a long future ahead as a contemporary dancer haha.

So all round it was wicked fun, and Cornelia is awesome and Radovan is cool, so we have this little group of juvenile delinquents who spend most of the time making fart jokes and talking like characters out of several tv shows instead of doing the serious work of rehearsing (which is a drag anyway), and out of this stupidity comes hell. And several people said to me the only thing they wanted was to see the whole thing, like 1 1/2 hours of some demented black metal gore-core performance. With fifty tvs, which get smashed up every night, and Chinese demons and binlang girls, and all kinds of other fun stuff.

Anyway, important things like the after-party, with mighty fine curry and beer, and talking and having fun, then the after-after-party in the dachstock, with Cambodian cassette music, chocolate, wine, food, half of St Gallan, and all-round hanging out until the white fog had so descended over Zürich looking out over the Limmat was like a fluffy white hazy ball occasionally glowing from the bridge lamps. Sleep, repeat.

Some choreographers like to drill a piece into the ground once it’s finished, rehearsing it until it’s like whipping a dead dog, to make it all smooth and machine-like and everyone in unison, ripping fingernails out in a scrabble for an imagined perfection. I prefer the opposite, and once it works once, leave it at that, and not try too hard to make it something beyond the point where everything coheres. It’s messier, and the possibility for strange things happening is far greater, which is what I like.

I’d rather have a performance which was alive, in which the piece could happen, fall apart, or somehow transcend itself. Too much focus on perfection is no different than programming an industrial robot, the delight in chaos is wholly absent, and as an observer, the predictable inevitability inherent in this getting-it-right approach is often heart-breaking.

I’d rather see dance that was like a drunken, drug-fuelled late-night loud gig, the band tearing up the stage, playing rough and the genius being endlessly pushed by the hysterical energy, the audience going mental. That kind of performance gives me the shivers. I’ve seen dance performances which have this, and I don’t know if I can make stuff like that but it’s what I’m trying to do.

We ran hell last night with all the gear, lights, video, sound, bikinis. It’s a very crazy and intense 12 minutes on the inside, and looking around when I get a chance, it looks like a large metal slap in the face. Anyway, with Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Sunn O))) providing the noise, it’s pretty difficult not to be a riot. It feels like we need the guy from Guns n Roses who does the intro warm-up on Nightrain, “you wanted the best, well they didn’t fucking make it, so here’s what you get …”.

Which is where Emile is about now, doing his first VJ gig in Europe/Deutschland on this trip, and was what we had very little of last night. Rehearsals the last two days have been concentrated on making something out of Botticelli’s etchings, which has been physically pretty tough, and lucky we get to pull faces and groan or it would be torture.

Bash bash bash on the floor, in a pathetic attempt to make dance. We spent Friday in Studio 3, setting up video and lights, and spacing the whole thing, which really doesn’t travel around alot. My interest in highly choreographed un-dance (which sometimes gets misinterpreted as acting, which it’s definitely not) has gone on from extermination, and is becoming something quite wierd. I’d really like to have three months just to work on some of this stuff, then another three months to make the equally enticing – for me – dance-dance.

So, over-intense colour video of planes crashing, horror movies, a soundtrack of death metal and doom-core, bikinis and of course Baudrillard. Emile is performing to as some kind of demented satan, and I’m in there too in yup, bikini.

But on to important things. After rehearsal we quickly got into drinking beer, eating bread, cheese, chocolate, snack food, drinking coffee, and making ourselves very comfortable watching The Mighty Boosh until the night was almost over. I slept very well.

I’d had this idea the reanimating of corpses would be good, but it’s become the best thing I’ve done all year … or something. It’s certainly getting weirder and becoming more creepy and funnier, which is mostly because Cornelia is a depraved pervert of a puppet master. So after playing with the scene for a bit, we moved on to new new new things.

Since extermination last year, I’ve been doing this thing of building bodies together into grotesque baroque tableaux pulled from etchings by Goya and Botticelli, and it’s still interesting for me, but while I could repeat it again and still find something new in it, the other side was how to reverse the etching, which I see as the equivalent of both photograph and film back onto living bodies. In particular, because there is the whole Dante’s Inferno thread in this work, I’ve been using Botticelli’s etching which accompanied the imprint.

One thing which immediately struck me in all his etchings in which there is a great host of bodies in torment was how this resembled not a crowd, but a single individual in torment and captured by the etching equivalent of a multiple exposure shot. One body eviscerated as it scrambles ever deeper into the circles of hell.

We spent most of the rehearsal mapping the individual bodies from one etching onto our own, which was suitably demonic in itself and then animating in-between until we had a chain of bodies repeatedly crashing to the floor and spasming in terror trying to haul off the serpents which crush their bodies in the image. Fun, bruising, and violent, which is how the work is shaping up. Tonight is more of the same plus car and plane crashes, and we’re saving the black mass for Friday.