ABSTRACT
To work with the dancer Martha Clarke on her Vienna/Lusthaus has been an unusual experience. I have been an admirer of hers for many years, starting with her “Pilobolus” days, and she likes what I do. Several times we have discussed collaboration on some future project. So far this has not happened, except that in the summer of 1984 (each of us doing her own stuff), we shared a program at the Lenox Arts Center in Massachusetts. In the meantime I joined her Vienna/Lusthaus production, and that is where the “unusual experience” started. Unusual? That’s not the right word. Totally uprooting is more like it. I had never in my life been directed by anyone except in some videos and in the very beginning of my dancing life by Palucca. After that I was always on my own, either as a solo performer or since 1954 with my own company, the Pantomime Circus. I could not have chosen a more extraordinary, engrossing and disturbing experience than working with Martha. First of all, I think she has a stroke of divine madness that is harnessed by her total professionalism, her total involvement, her unbelievable energy, and her almost somnambulistic way of finding the right footing on the tightrope walk across the abyss of her fantasy.
