epilogue

What remains about Piano Etudes is in this last blog, backgrounds, portraits, references, sources, reflections, on making theatre. For me of course it was a big adventure, developing the idea of transforming written stories into a theatre-performance.
This process developed little by little and the performers, Mariken Bijnen and Ilke Turpijn played an essential part. There existed twenty stories, no dramaturgy in advance, no scenario.

Mariken en Ilke actrices  Mariken Bijnen & Ilke Turpijn

photo: Marta Golebiowska

We started with improvisations. First with only the actresses to find a base for the interpretations. Later on the musicians joined in and the stories expanded into scenes.

Tomasz Górny en Magdalena Golebiowska copy Magdalena Golebiowska & Tomasz Górny

photo: Marcio Tavora

All the time we looked for authenticity and the actresses always cooperated with me in a very special way, based on their playing and directing experiences. At one time I was the director, another time a reflecting eye at a distance. Obviously we had to find our balance and this was a process in itself. But this has been honest and constructive and also very exciting, but throughout continually searching for progress.
Sometimes there have been obstacles, an important one was in which way the individual scenes, could be more fluid and connect more with each other. An essential input of the actresses has been the life-stream-camera. Contently so close to the idea of looking, but also as a woven thread trough the scenes. And so it happened. We did eventually find out our relationships in Piano Etudes in a very fruitful way, whereby I became happy with their confidence, surroundings and initiatives. This occurred also between the actresses and musicians, so that more and more their cooperation smelted beautifully together.

With the Productions it proved an important decision to ask Abdullah Geels and Evan Morris for sound projection and light. This made the performances more professional and gave us a confident base to do the necessary preparations in the theatres, together with the technicians in situ, within quite a short time. Their attitude has been calm, all the time in control and precise and that works very well for the actresses and musicians and for me as director. Each time at the end of the preparations we could manage to have a run-through that the performance could rely upon.

In the background others played a special part, including Veronica Divendal together with Ernestien Lammens, for the production, the sponsors, financing, budgets and bookkeeping. Brigitte van Hagen gave good advices about budgets and the approach of theaters. Veronica was also an important partner in the dialogue concerning all kinds of elements in various areas, without her I was in danger of sinking into the swamp of theatre production! For publicity we tried everything to project Piano Etudes. This succeeded well with online publicity and in the various publicity agendas. Geertje van Emmerik and Stefanie Grimbergen certainly did everything with heart and soul. Without their efforts we could not have come so far. Also Christiaan Honig, who built up the website and continually assisted me with the print work, all very important and supporting.

As a most important partner I must particularly mention Annelies Grimbergen, who continually gave her own vision and comment, playing her part in all kinds of production elements, such as bookselling, the preparation of the meals for the crew, to spreading out flyers and posters in different cities during the tour and supporting me unconditionally throughout both the broad and detailed totality.

Of course I must congratulate the visual artists, so directly and immediately producing their drawings and visual works, inspired by the stories, at both the Brazilian and European sides. Their work has been optimally exposed in the performances and the special exhibition which we could show in a smaller or bigger format in almost all the theatres. Also my foreign partners, including the ‘pianitas’ in São Paulo and Emmanuelle Schwartz in Vézelay, who gave me their trust and offered me space in some form for Piano Etudes, now and in the future.

And also thanks to all who have made possible this project financially. Without them it should be not possible at all. On the bottom of this page you see the foundations and supporters, but I will mention them here again:  Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, VSB-fonds, Fonds21, J.P.Ruigrokstichting and the Henri Moerel Foundation. But also all who contributed in crowdfunding via Voordekunst and you all who came to the performances and bought tickets, sometimes even twice. Our gratitude is strong, in our believe that without you all, this project should be never realized.

Also those theaters who believed in our project and take risk, in partage, like Compagnietheater in Amsterdam, Parktheater in Alphen aan den Rijn, Grand Theatre in Groningen, or bought our performance almost or complete, Engelenbaktheater in Zaltbommel en the unsurpassed Toneelschuur in Haarlem. Thanks also to all directors and programmers believing in adventure and experiment, not like the Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten which goes just for predictable safety.

The website will continue and include further news, but is also the archive of the 50 blogs I wrote.
For me personally Piano Etudes was a miraculous adventure, being both grandiose and stirring.

……….. now back to something smaller!

# 50 translating & interpreting

Piano Etudes has been an intensive project of translating, besides the grouping of texts, music, theatre and exhibition. This is most visible in the book of Piano Etudes, in which the basic Dutch text has been adapted, as have the English, Portuguese and French translations.
The accessibility of the texts, first in English, later on in the other languages, opened doors for the participating artists and performances in Brazil and Europe. (more…)

# 49 The music in Piano Etudes, choices and composers -2

Also some other pieces are specially composed for Piano Etudes, like Piano Fingers from Tomasz Górny, the other pianist, inspired by the dynamics of the same titled etude, nr 3. The third composer, who wrote original music especially for Piano Etudes, is Cees Thissen. That became cooing, chinking & culminating, in etude 18. Two of the three compositions can be heard in the play, integrated in the dynamics of the final phase, but completely recorded by Cees himself. (more…)

# 48 The music in Piano Etudes, choices and composers -1

The music that plays a part in Piano Etudes, is a special selection. When choosing, some factors played an important part. A trivial one, but not unimportant, was that the chosen compositions should not be too long, from the perspective of the length of a performance, as well as for keeping a good balance between text and music.  In content I have chosen for music whit a certain mood, not too intrusive, but offering space for musing. Because musing is storytelling by nature, the music that is connected with that, should just touch this space, not filling in completely, but rather surrounding it. (more…)

# 47 Pianitas

Since a few years ago I have worked  together with friend photographer Marcelo Greco, an engaged artist and teacher. He discovered my work in Holland and invited me to start cooperating with him in São Paulo, after my participation in a photofestival in Paraty, organized by him. Marcelo is teacher at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo and he also has his own workgroups. 
In the workshops he asked me to give, I try to work along the same line, to give a strong impulse to the work of students, to help them to show their face and character in the work they create. (more…)

# 46 Homage at Seurat

In 1964 the French photographer Jean Loup Sieff photographed a woman, nude, standing before an empty wall: Hommage à Seurat.
What about these homages? An alibi? A quote? A reproduction? An Inspiration? (more…)

# 45 alphabet

It started like this: there was a wood in a, in which b together with c and d had built a stage, for which e years before had already made a roof decoration. The stage became a striking small theatre in province f, where you could often go and see performances, as I remember g on a Sunday afternoon in h and where you could see dance i and j dancing to the music of k. Sometimes there were song contests, which were frequently visited. (more…)

# 44 Isabelle III

Another four years pass and Isabelle sends me an email with a request to photograph her once again, this time with her recently born second child, a boy called Maxence.

I enter the house once again and find her with husband and baby. Her daughter Albane who I was not yet able to behold four years previously is nowhere to be seen. She tells me later that she is at the childcare centre.
I plan to do whatever it takes to avoid ‘loving mother with child’-photos. Not that she requests this, but it is something that would happen before you know it. (more…)

# 43 Isabelle II

Five years later, July 2004, she sends me an email to tell me that she is pregnant with a daughter. She is now married and has moved to a bigger and lighter apartment. She is seven months pregnant. She would like me to photograph her before her baby is born. One month later I travel to Paris, when she is eight months pregnant.

I find her in a state of ‘absence’. (more…)

# 42 Isabelle I

One day in 1999 I receive a letter from a woman, unknown to me, in Paris. She introduces herself and explains that, after seeing some of my photos in a gallery, she would like me to photograph her. She explains that she has previously made the same request of a number of photographers whose work has seized her attention, and that she likes to be photographed in a free style, according to the preferences of the photographer. I decide to act upon her request and suggest we should first meet before deciding whether to proceed with the project. (more…)

# 41 They shoot horses, don’t they?

From the moment that I visited the Manege Carnier in the Jardin du Luxembourg for the first time, I was hooked. The grand architect of the Old opera -still called Opéra Garnier- made a merry-go-round for the Jardin, maybe as birthday present for his little daughter. After all sometimes you want something else than having to push the small sailing boats with a little stick each Sunday in the great round pond in front of the Palais du Luxembourg.

jardin-de-L copy

A birthday present sounds easy, but to make a perfect merry-go-round wit all the animals and luck of the world, is a master proof, more than building an opera. (more…)

# 40 collection

One of the most beautiful books from my collections is Peter Bekker’s booklet Steinway & Sons, which I was telling about in Etude 12, Piano destination. The story about the end of the life of a piano, is unequalled and he is telling this in a dry, light ironic style in a unique booklet in which he is giving at the end the thirteen characters from Steinway & Sons a new destination. I didn’t need to do much more as following his own text and just quote him here and there, in which way this transitoriness got its form in this humus of language and piano. (more…)

# 39 Dialogue and shadow

The Japanese cineaste Yasujiro Ozu stages the dialogues in such a way that the personages avoid looking at each other. During a conversation they find themselves next to each other, looking in the same direction. These, as theJapanese film critic Tadao Sato writes: ‘are dialogues whereby the personagessit next to each other in a room with a view of the garden and talking together, meanwhile their view is unanimously directed towards the garden. Or dialogues where the personages sit on an incline, or a border and talk to eachother whilst looking together at the surface of a river’. (more…)

# 38 Stones Sand & Swan

Once he discovered on a crispy clear morning in Madrid in the bookshop of the Reina Sofia a booklet Gramática de meseta, from Ibon Aranberri. He reads on the cover: “At the foot of the hill lies a pile of stones numbered, waiting for another destiny. As if attributing reason to stones made any sense. As if stones had consciousness and were able to sense the disorder in which they were placed there.” He opened the booklet and discovered a picture of a sundial, deconstructed, put in the sand, cut off his daily moving shadow and time. It reminds him to bring some sand for the sand-collection of his sister, saved in tiny small glass bottles. (more…)

# 37 Binoculars

The ship is a vibrating shape, more or less. A complete standstill is never there. A link combining a fast and a fluid form is embodied in a ship, a body in movement. Wind and water caress or beat against the ship. Ship delves deep. Ship soars high, higgledy-piggledy, but not upside down, because then it becomes an absurdity of a condemned stagnation, clearly already on its last, short voyage. On the border of water and land, the view towards the ship is the most steadfast. It has the stability of earth as a carrier and the empty space is a stage for the ship. (more…)

# 36 The piano as model

For a long time in the introduction text of Piano Etudes one could read: twenty stories with the piano as the main character, but in fact it should read: with the piano as model. In each of the twenty stories the piano takes on another form, continually playing another character: as a seducer, as a guide, or offering resistance, as the to be conquered lover, as a tool of imagination. (more…)

# 35 Luigi Ghirri’s inner landscapes

In the year 2000 I completed a series of works: Sea of Marmara, ships lying nearby Istanbul. For many years I was already intrigued by these ships, staying there as special and poetic objects in the huge space of the sea, mostly waiting for a reason to sail on. But after these series I was looking for a comparable phenomenon, not in the abstract space of the sea, but in a cultural landscape. (more…)

# 34 Celati

In Etude 13, L’invitation au voyage, I introduce Luigi Ghirri and Ferrara in an imaginary way, but totally influenced by Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati, just as my images from the Po-Valley, which I show in this etude in the performance. (more…)

# 33 Deruta

Calvino’s cities are from a smaller scale, on a human size originated and developed. In Etude 17, Deruta is such a city. The real Deruta is situated in Umbria in Italy and should not have had such a special meaning if there had not been a prosperous ceramic industry since the 12th century, because of the presence of useful clay near by.

Deruta ceramics is based on a tradition of centuries, hand painted domestic pottery: plates, cans, cups, all painted in decorative motives, inspired by nature. Simple motives, from classic to more modern elements, elegant and popular at the same time. Motives of leaves, flowers, birds. (more…)

# 32 Calvino-2 Cité Modèle, dream if one has been there once

Through which gets a place its meaning, is it becoming more than the sum of the facts? It has everything to do with the way we are related to this place. In that sense the place of birth is the centre of the world and depending from country, history and circumstances, a place of security and freedom.

What a pain it causes when a place of birth is destroyed by a war, so many people on the run are speaking about this, it’s a serious attack on their identity. (more…)

# 31 Calvino-1 Invisible cities

A good friend, Lies Janssen, – an excellent editor and producer in so many productions, I know from my own experience being part in the documentary movie So as not to forget… from Tamara Miranda-, interviewed the Italian writer Gianni Celati for a tv-programm ‘Memory of the landscape’, a talk about Calvino’s Invisible cities and about images of landscapes in Celati’s own work. (more…)

# 30 Out of sight – epilogue

Did we ever spend the night in Auberge Prégouttes in Rupt sur Moselle? After some years I start doubting.
Some years ago, on our way to Italy, we tried to find back the Auberge Prégouttes in Rupt sur Moselle, but there were just left a ruin. Asking in the village pub we discovered some history. (more…)

# 29 Out of sight – part 4

But everything was not to be solved at once, this would happen slowly, step by step, because each phase contains its own story and value.
Of course, as I suspected, we were talking about a masterwork out of sight, but that was not the reason for my quest. My search was born in the appearance of that magical moment, during which all kinds of factors fell together and started being connected with my first view of this painting, in these romantic circumstances: there, in this hotel, a passage for travellers. (more…)

# 28 Out of sight – part 3

A few months later, like as a real detective, I was in the eight arrondissement of Paris, to look for the Galerie Ecalle, hoping to find the antecedents of this painter Desgranges.
On the corner of Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Rue Royale, a chic neighbourhood, with a plenty of banks, fashion shops and new buildings, I found no trace of any gallery at number three. No one could remember a gallery being there. (more…)

# 27 Out of sight – part 2

We dined in the hotel which was decorated with a lot of knick-knacks, antlers and huge paintings with bad still lives, guinea fowls and hunting-parties. We were the last guests. The cook and the waiter, also the owners, had their dinner in a side room, connected to the dining room. At the end of the meal, I asked if I could buy the painting from our room, because, like I said emotionally, it showed a landscape that reminded me of my childhood. That last point was an adapted version of the without any doubt in my childhood, cherished emotional meaning of the landscape. (more…)

# 26 Out of sight – part 1

During the summer of 2000, my girlfriend A. and I travelled to Italy.
We spent the night in a small hotel close to the source of the Moselle, not far from the French-Swiss border. We could just hear some birds. and of course a dog you hear everywhere in the countryside, to shake you up half-dead at the most unexpected moments. Mostly they are behind a gate, but that’s also rather close by. Our room was at the back of the hotel, on the eastside, even more birds and chickens. The hotel, Auberge Prégouttes, has something to do with the first raindrops before a shower breaks through. And it was just like that: we were just in bed when heavy rain waves lashed on the windows. We fell asleep at the beginning of a holiday. (more…)

# 25 Loustal-2 the story teller

My attention to the autonomous art of the picture strip, the graphic novel, dated from some twenty years ago. Before that I was concerned with Tintin, Asterix and later on some Dutch artists as Joost Swarte, who had already given this medium its autonomous power. (more…)

# 22 stones – episode V

Forget for a second that it is all made up and that it does not matter. You now want to know whether they will find each other, where that will happen, whether there is any hope for a happy ending. What else should you do with all this otherwise? (more…)

# 21 garden – episode IV

Did she sometimes forget that the garden had so much shade, so many black holes in which to disappear, to dissolve in the invisible? A blackbird lands on the edge of a water basin and switches between washing and vigilance with continual rhythm. His wet wings splash light that extinguishes in the shade. The peaceful place is but an appearance. In the garden death is constantly lurking. (more…)

# 20 island – episode III

Did they each walk in circles on opposite sides of the island without ever meeting each other? A turning wheel that only goes in one direction? That cannot be, can it? The ferry had docked and he had stepped out to land over the railing, she had stepped out under the railing, from another deck and as if the devil was playing with them; they still were not allowed to meet, maybe they would never meet, who knows. (more…)

# 19 ferry boat – episode II

Imagine that yesterday she boarded the ferry to the island. She would meet a man who did not turn up or was she perhaps mistaken? She stood by the railing and with her eyes under long lashes she followed a seagull hovering on a stroke of wind. A drizzly rain made the dull deck shiny. It reflected the sky in gray wisps of silver. (more…)

# 18 inner court – episode I

Imagine you are in the room of a hotel near the railway station. At night you hear the sound of train wheels rattle on the rail-switches. It transports you immediately to stories of unknown men and women arriving in somnolent towns. They each come from a different direction, in order to meet, it may as well be in the room next to yours. (more…)

# 17 on writing in café’s

Different etudes found their writing origin in a café. Already the first one happened like this in the open space café in the terminal of airport São Paulo, in September 2013. A lot of the etudes have been born in these unique meeting rooms. Sartre wrote once about café’s: I never stop liking to sit in chairs of nobody (or, as you wish, of everyone) at tables from nobody: that’s the reason I like to work in café’s – so I get a certain loneliness and abstraction.” (more…)

# 16 seven women – on Cria Cuervos (finish)

Seven women play the principal part in Ana’s life and they embrace all women of the world. The sisters: the 5-years old innocent Maite, and the eleven years old elder Irene in her puberty, the in herself disappeared grandmother, the loving and suffering mother, the cold egocentric substitute aunt Pauline, the open-hearted Rosa and the femme fatale Amelia. (more…)

# 15 the house and the rooms

Today en coming Thursday the two last reflections on Cria Cuervos, one about the house (home) and the rooms, the other about the women in the story, and, turning backwards to the beginning, about the immortal view of the child. The house of your youth is an universum. Magical, mythical, or a hell on earth… The roots of your identity are there and are being formed and deformed. Identity is a dynamic process, a continuous search for who you are. (more…)

# 14 Madalena Golebiowska, voice and piano

I didn’t find Magdalena through auditions, but through Tomasz Górny, who knew her from the conservatory. I don’t believe in auditions, it’s too detached and too much just waiting. You have to look for yourself and see who appears on your path. (more…)

# 13 the nourishing of ravens – on Cria Cuervos

Still two times about Cria Cuervos. Why is this movie that important for me and so meaningful? Where is her enormous beauty hidden? To find an answer on this, I concentrated myself on Ana Torrent, who plays the nine-years old Ana (and the mother in retrospective), the pivot of the movie. (more…)

# 11 the empty space-2

The day after the premiere the images which are the start of the play, the piano in an empty space. The two invited artists who reacted to the very first Piano Etude piano light, were the Dutch artists Popel Coumou and the Brazilian Rafael Godoy. They didn’t know each other, but from now on their work is connected with this Etude. It affects each other in different ways. (more…)

#10 Tomas Górny, child of the border-1

Tomasz Górny, one of the two pianists of the Piano Etudes, was born in Zebrydowice, in Poland, 1985. This village is situated close to the Czech border. Before the First World War, this area had been part of the Hungarian-Austrian empire. After the war it became Polish. During the Second World War the area became German, and although most of the inhabitants were speaking German, from an earlier period they considered themselves under German occupation, after 1945 it became Polish again. All these languages and cultures have influenced this region. The school was in Cieszyn, exactly on the border, the river Olza went through the middle of the town, one side Czech, the other side Polish. (more…)

#9 the empty space-1

The empty space is a theatrical space. In the world there is no real empty space. There’s always the touch of the world as all-embracing space, the invading nature, the air, light, the breath of history, the memory of an earlier moment, a human story. (more…)

#8 the immortal look – on Cria Cuervos-1/6

Piano Etude 9 piano dream, refers to Ana Torrent in the Spanish movie Cria Cuervos from Carlos Saura, in 1976. During one’s life maybe just a few books and movies have a strong impact on you, without knowing exactly why. Such a movie has been Cria Cuervos. (more…)

#7 The unexpected – about Roland Barthes-3

Last summer I bought in café Les Hirondelles at the Plaçe sous l’Orme in Asquins, at the foot of the Vézelay hill, a Le Monde special ‘hors-série’ about the French philosopher and author Roland Barthes – the unexpected. On occasion of the centenary, the hundred year birthday remembrance of ‘a revolutionary of language’. (more…)

#6 The absentee – about Roland Barthes-2

La chambre Claire by Roland Barthes has been published in 1980, a shockwave in the world of photographers. For the first time the medium photography had its philosophical foundation, her own philosopher of illusion. In that period we all read it, but it still has fallen into oblivion, just like Roland Barthes himself, as it happens with past lives and books. Or will there be a ‘classic’ –, or ‘a vintage’ reissue published just in time.
(more…)

#5 Rue Bichat – on Roland Barthes-1

My nineteenth etude: white melancholy, in which Roland Barthes figures, is situated in the Paris tenth quarter and just as in the books of Simenon and Patrick Modiano, the names of streets and café’s do form a poem in itself. The rue Bichat, café: Le coup de Torchon, the rue des Écluses Saint-Martin. (more…)

#4 Drawing remembering and recognizing -1/2

To draw is something very primeval in fact. Its origin is in each of us, everyone can do it. The first thing a child will do with a pencil on paper, or on a table, a wall or what else, is to make a drawing. No painting, design, no poem or composition directly for three violins –except Mozart I think-, but a growing-line born from the hand, as if it moves out of itself and directly shows something. The first distance between me and what I am doing… (more…)

#3 Catching the eye

‘As you are all SURELY aware, August 15th is one of the biggest feast days of Orthodoxy, and my official Name-day! Since as most of you know, I am such a devout believer I plan to observe the holiday in the traditional way: Open house/block party at mine from five o clock on! B.Y.O.B. and whatever you want to throw on our tiny grill…I’ll have a couple of bottles of ouzo and plenty of ice waiting!’

(more…)

#2 Coming from afar…

Someone comes running from afar, first a dot and then slowly a dash, becoming a figure in the backlight. He stands before you and takes your place, turns around, looks through the empty street and is surprised (more…)

#1 I am so so

Until when is a portrait still actual? Is not a portrait by definition a reflection from the past? And what is it representing anyway?

In fact the photographic portrait is pure fiction and at most guides towards reality. The portrait is telling, suggesting, raising questions such as: who is this human being?

In that way the photographic portrait does not differ from the painted one, the drawn, filmed or written one. All are interpretations, with expressive means realized, from someone at a certain moment in time. (more…)