“Dance is intensified living”
Iván Pérez is a choreographer who has been working with the Paris Opera, NDT, IT Dansa, Ballet Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, and the National Theatre of Taipei. He is the Artistic Director of Dance Theatre Heidelberg.
-First of all, you have an incredible career. What is the key to all your successes?
“What worked for me is believing in myself, to trust that the passion and interest I had, in the dance that I do, in the people that I’m working with, is going to be the result. So, you need to trust a lot in yourself and what interests you is really important and let it drive you. It is about that truth that moves you and is shown in you, the honesty, authenticity.”
-How did you develop your artistry, in your work as a choreographer?
“I did my studies in choreography in Madrid, and it was my basis for my development later on, but it opened me the curiosity about the history of theatre, dance, the performing arts, what are all the elements and disciplines that could interact with dance. Understanding that what we see on stage has a lot of roots in anthropology, psychology and could really expand the art forms into other disciplines, for me was really fascinating: I’m really interested in emotional psychology, sociology, even if I’m not an expert, bringing all these things together I think is important. After the studies, I started with some competitions, with small pieces, moving around, and then in NDT I had space every year to create a piece of 8 minutes, so I started showing myself, until other big opportunities, like “upcoming choreographer”. It is all about keeping the practice, always in parallel to the dance: when I was dancing, I was always choreographing to the side and somehow that parallel part became actually the strongest.”
-As a dancer, you worked in NDT and IT Dansa. How do these experiences influence you and your choreographies today?
“Very much. We are the result of our education, of our experiences. And even if I worked in IT Dansa only for one year I got the chance to learn pieces of choreographers who have not passed in NDT, for example, Riorta or Wim Vandekeybus, choreographers that somehow NDT doesn’t work with. But, in NDT there were also very very big choreographers: so I have in my skin Ohad Naharin, William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Mats Ek, and many others. And this amalgam of experiences eventually getting form in what I do now and how I express myself. I also started with flamenco, and even if it was in my early beginning, something is still there.”
-How do you work during the creation of a piece?
“There are kinds of great topics that drive me for a while and collectivity is one of them: so how are we together? How do we communicate together? So recognizing yourself in the other, the idea of empathy, connection, and togetherness and I do that also in the way we behave, we communicate in the studio. It is a kind of study about how we function as a group, as a company, and also how we dance together. So philosophy or ethics of the company become also the ethic of the work, so now I’m trying to bring those together and somehow have whatever you see on stage as a parallel of how the company functions.”
-As a choreographer, what fascinates you about creating a piece?
“For me, it is the power that the stage has to transport us, somewhere beyond the casual, in a parallel reality, in a space I called “hided awareness or intensify living”, it is life intensified, so I think there's a kind of potential channel for the audience to connect to what is happening on stage and process spiritual or emotional issues and process that are very personal. I really like to create experiences for the audience that could be like that, that could be personal, spiritual, and emotional.”
-When you create a piece, what catches your attention in another dancer?
“If I see the dancers, dancing from a place of curiosity, but also connecting to him/herself or themselves, for me, it is very important, because it gives you something rather than you want to give something to the audience or you want to dance in order to get affirmation from the others; when I see dancers looking for affirmation, they are not connected to themselves. I’m very attractive when I see dancers connecting to themselves and being generous in allowing us to see them like that.”
-When can you actually define if you are satisfied with your work?
“I’m never really satisfied. I tend to always realize that I can do better, not in terms of quantity, but to recognize my personal limitations and I can see them in the work, that I’m growing as an artist, as a person. And it is also a way to reflect on myself in the work and I need compassion and empathy to understand that I am who I am in the process, and I can’t ask for more, but I can use the work as a reflection to grow from it. But there are certain pieces that have a kind of achievement in themselves, a personality, a character that teaches me something, and also the people around me. I have dancers around me I have been working with for six, seven, eight years now and they were very young when we started, project by project since 2012/2013 and there are certain pieces that coming back we realized they still need something, and we try to understand what and why.”
-What is the importance of the process of improvisation and researching?
“It is 100% the core of what we do because I think the only way to get to know yourself is through improvisation, to appreciate, to taste yourself, to know what is that moves you, so authenticity and personality and allow yourself to dance for the sake of dancing, of allowing your emotions and senses to be opened. And we use it as a practice to find and meet ourselves, and to create.”
-What is the importance of technique and what is it?
“I think technique is important because it makes you work in a different way, it challenges you in a different way, it makes your brain work and reminds you of all the possibilities. In ballet, you can realize that your body can behave and coordinate in a certain way. And then in contemporary, you realize that technology is a set of tools and rules that work on your body connections.”
-What is the biggest challenge you had so far?
“The biggest challenge is always for me keeping a balance between what I want to do, what I think the audience wants me to do, what I think, what the director wants me to do. So dealing with expectations and inner desires and I feel that it is always a negotiation because in every moment you present the piece you have to wait for the response and this is going to influence the development of your career, your next work. This dialogue is the most challenging: to recognize that there are ups and downs, positive and negative responses, always. And you cannot know if the audience is going to like your piece and the only thing you can do is make a hypothesis of what people are going to feel, but eventually, you only have your own feeling in the studio and how you feel, this is the only thing I have to trust myself because it is moving me, and if it moves me at least I’m giving the audience something that is personal to me, which is my own sensitivity. Trusting that is the only thing I can do.”
-Why do you think art is so important, and what can we do to not let it die?
“I think it is living for it and not thinking about it as a job, but to really let art and culture inspire us, to be inspired, and then to have the energy to continue creating art and to continue allowing people to be inspired by it. As artists, we need to be the first ones to be moved and affected by art and sometimes we are focused on making art and we forget to feel the art. And it is important because it moves us, it has an impact on our lives and even now in the Corona time, it has been interesting because what keeps us alive was all the art available online: so, we should remind ourselves that we survive because we watch movies, we put a song while we clean our house, while we calm ourselves down, or watching dance or any other art form. It is food for the spirit, people need it, also intellectually as well.”
-You are so creative and passionate. You also create a performance to help the small businesses after the hard period of the virus. So, what is the connection between art and being a choreographer with society?
“They are one thing: art is part of our society, of our system. It is like education, health, justice, or culture. It is really an important part of society. I think we should realize that we don’t do art for people, but we do it as a way to connect to people, so you open the channel of connection, and if you want to connect you don’t think very much about what you are going to do because you already know how to connect. And somehow this project was created for this, to connect. The theatre has been closed for a few months and so we have been away from the audience, away from people, preparing how to come back in September but nobody knows. So, this project was the best way to remind people that we are still here, that we are part of the city, that we can support the businesses but we can also come close to the audience. And it was great to see people remember that we are there to connect to them.”
-What fascinates you about this world so much to never give up and be always passionate?
“For me, this is just the beginning. I feel everything I have done so far was to get to this point and now that I am the director I am learning how to be a director, how to curate a festival that will happen in Heidelberg. Now I’m doing pieces with an orchestra of 34 musicians, and in 2021/22 I will do a piece with 60 musicians and I have never done it before. Things are evolving and I realized that it is always a beginning, a new beginning. It doesn’t matter how much you have done, it is so much you don’t know and so much you can grow into.”
-You are the artistic director of Dance Theatre Heidelberg. How challenging was this experience for you?
“It is still challenging. I have been 15 years in the Netherlands, so it was my first time in a new country, learning a new language, meeting an audience that is your audience, because it is almost always the same people that I need to convince, so it is a kind of relationship you keep. We are a company of 12 dancers and we need to prove that we deserve to be there, to be paid every month in order to do our work. It is a day to day work to show we are doing something beautiful. The biggest challenge was to let people understand what we were about, that people feel that we are here to connect with them. Communication is the bigger topic, be open to sharing.”
-Can you describe yourself as a choreographer in three words?
“Passionate, compassionate and vulnerable”
-Can you give some advice to young dancers and choreographers?
“Don’t give up, first of all. Follow the people you love and you are inspired by, watch what they do, read about them, also open your field of interest: if you are interested in any other discipline (literature, science, fashion), invest time in getting to know more about that because it is going to feed you, it is going to feed your dance. But also invest in life, experiences, fall in love, have a heartbreak, because that is going to let you grow. Don’t think only work, dance, think life-dance.”
Thank you for this chance Iván, it was such an honor for us!
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