Manifesto, January 2024
I am Annemijn Rijk, choreographer and philosopher. With my company Body of Art I create sensory, embodied theatre experiences that take place in the body of the performers, in the body of the audience and in space.
Before I can share my plans about creating work, work about the relationship we have as humans to the world around us, work for which I also want to use public money, I think it is important to first consciously share my own orientation, position in, and perspective on the world. I am a woman, highly educated, white, highly gifted, Western and at 30, I am still relatively young. Privilege. I am also queer, empath, feminist, have extensive trauma experience, and feel intrinsically that changing the established order is necessary and urgent. From my position, I create my work for, and my work will have the most impact on, people who, like me, prefer to deal with the pain of discomfort rather than be numbed by the status quo.
My plans for the future revolve around a big question: Where are we going? In what sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as an “increasingly accelerating society, characterized by aggression,” it is difficult to find my bearings. I want to turn, but I go straight ahead. I want to take my time, be sustainable, be healthy, and contribute responsibly to the world around me, but I pollute. I go fast and it feels like I have to go faster and faster, deliver, exhaust myself and push through, be here and there at the same time.
Looking at the world around me, I notice that the way in which we as humanity, in relation to our environment, take up a place on earth is based on power, a need to know, control, and dominance. We decide what something is, we decide who can live where and for how long, how much forest remains, which animal dies and which animal does not. We decide where the water flows, what a centimeter is and how quickly the world as we think we know it will be destroyed by our own actions. As if it were ours.
“Three billion animals died in the wildfires in Australia. Where does all the pain go?” I heard in a TV series. That sentence haunts me, paralyzes me. I think of all the people with burn-out complaints, of all the young people with suicidal thoughts, now more than ever, of children who wake up at night with inexplicable panic attacks, of the existential loneliness that I and so many others feel when, after seeing yet another burning forest on TV, we once again, powerlessly and without consent, give up a piece of hope. At the same time, that sentence activates me like never before. It reinforces my idea that as artists we need to make a difference, and that theatre can do that. It motivates me to activate audiences through my work, to break out of the paralysing passivity, and to get close to them. My job is not to convince, but to start something in others.
Where does all the pain go? As one of my performers said after rehearsing a scene: “Being here gives us the enormous responsibility to be a healthy cell in the whole of totality”. That is why I do not look at what I want to bring to the world with theatre, but at what I think the world needs from theatre now.
I believe that art can calibrate our internal compass. Art can make visible an ‘internal equivalent’ of something that has always been present in us, but hidden or invisible. To make it tangible. In this way, art can bring to the surface sensations, emotions, ideas, or insights that are hidden under the paralysing veil of the status quo. That is what I want and need to do with my makership. Making the invisible visible. Not by creating it, but by revealing it. Giving people back what they have lost because of the way the world is organized. That creates autonomy, hope, a horizon, decisiveness. It allows us to determine our own route and to see our place in the collective and the larger ecosystem. The ecosystem that we do not make, but that we are part of. It makes us.
In the coming years I will ask the question of where we are going. For myself I do that by redefining dance, art, and perception. In addition to being a maker, I am also a philosopher, graduated in phenomenology; the philosophy of perception. Existing systems, paths taken, power relations and power paralysis, hierarchies and conventions; just by changing our way of perceiving we can challenge, strip down and reload those concepts. With new energy, with the voice of and a view of future generations who do not benefit from talking about, but from doing. Because they still have to. Because they still want to. Just like the rivers, the animals, the forests, our descendants and theirs after that, and theirs after that.
I do not want to pretend that I can do much within the major themes that I am now quoting. I am only too aware of my limited position. These major themes form the context within which I relate to the world and the future as a human being and creator, and I feel the drive to do everything within my circle of influence and with the resources I have to give substance to what I can do.
So where are we going? With my work I reach out to my audience. With those who dare, I dive deep, take unknown turns, get horribly lost and together we explore new paradigms, beyond what is logical, what we already know, what is visible, or how we have learned how to do it. To ultimately reorient ourselves together, in the safety of a theatrical context.
I believe that as artists we must continue to fight against those parts of ourselves that are tempted to play the game of the world as it is, and we must continue to create to make our own lives and those of others as liveable as possible. That struggle is not only necessary, but also irresistible, because there is where life is.