Far too close

Photo: Jiří Kylián
On this photo: Egon Madsen, Sabine Kupferberg

Choreographer: Jiří Kylián

This new Kylián work is commissioned by Saitama Arts Theater and forms a co-production between Saitama and Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT).

Message from Jiří Kylián for Saitama Arts Theater:

“We are constantly in motion
We never stop moving
Even when just sitting down,
Our mind, our feelings, fantasy, thoughts, and even our body is constantly on the move from one landscape to another.
We are in a permanent changing room.
The word ‘movement’ carries much symbolism and meaning.
It is directly connected to the words ‘Distance’, ‘Time’, ‘Far’, ‘Close’, and many others…
Our emotional world is closely linked to movement: in many languages there is a direct connection between the two words:
- motion and emotion –
- we move and we are moved –
It is obvious, that moving closer to something, means moving further away from something else.
This simple fact seems to me a fundamental question, we should ask ourselves whenever we decide ‘to make a move’
- as dancers on stage, or as anybody moving through life- :
‘…are we moving in order to come closer to something,
To enter a new space and experience – or – in order to move away, out of something, in order to forget…’
Are we moving to create future memories, or to forget the ones we have passed?
In our curious journey through life, often we arrive ‘far too close’ to one thing, so that we cannot see it in its complete form-
And maybe ‘too far’ from the other to be able to see any detail.
In any case all our moves (emotional or physical) leave deep wrinkles in our hearts.
They are like the lines in the sand of a zen-garden in which only our spiritual fantasy grows – or like the furrows of a fertile field on which our food grows, which enables us to make Zen gardens, which inspires us to build fertile fields to feed us, which enable us to create Zen gardens, which inspire us…forever.”
Jiří Kylián, June 25, 2003