ABSTRACT
Sometimes I have been tempted to call myself “the dancing Hausfrau.” I love to cook. I love to bake. I love to have my friends share a meal with me. And of course I love to dance. But where is the connection between the two? Is there a similar joy involved in both? Or is it the success it can create? I really don’t know. When my guests ask for a second – or third! – helping, I know I’ve done all right. But when I invent a new dance, I have no idea whether it is any good until I have performed it at least once. Not necessarily for an audience in a theater. It can be for just one person in a studio. But I need to bounce it off someone who has not seen it before. It seems that this gives me the distance I need to judge my own work. It does not mean at all that I must have approval; more important is that during the first showing I myself can agree with what I’ve done. It has happened several times that an audience accepted a new number, but I myself could not. Then it is better to take it out. Sometimes it can be mended, but not always. Or the opposite happens. An audience reacts poorly during a première, but I feel positive about it. Then I keep on doing it, at least until I have given it a chance to survive. When I did “The Artist in Person” for the first time in the Peppermill Program in Switzerland, there was no laughter at all from the audience and not one bit of applause at the end. This was quite disconcerting since the number is a satire, but I felt strongly that I should continue doing it. Later, it became the main reason that Voskovec and Werich asked me to join their Liberated Theater in Prague. It’s all a bit of a mystery to me, including the fact that some of the best ideas for dances have come to me when I was cooking or baking. That sounds quite pedestrian, but it’s true. Of course, comparisons can be very lopsided, but may be – after all – somewhere – there is a connection between a strudel and a tango.
