Which art do we need now ?

The contemporary performance art scene cherishes to welter in the mire of pulsions, passions, phantasms and simulacra, or to indulge in conceptualism. Hence, this art operates through recognition of actual or fictitious human conditions, and through reducing art to cognition. This art is human, all too human.

If, rarely, the spiritual or the transcendent is spoken of, it is either to restore a conservative aesthetics or to rave about hazy new age commonplaces.

In my view, art should strive for a transformation potential through the touch of the Sublime. This transcendency by no means implies a cartesian split of bodily and spiritual realms. Dance can not exclude the wisdom of the body.

Neither does art expel the pathogenic germ, proper to every era or culture : art is a patient, but should be also a doctor. If emotions and pain be there, it is to transform them into beauty and even more : into the sublime, created by the ‘prepared’ body-soul in full presence here and now, affirming itself in its highest flight, fuelled by vertical energies radiating and redistributed through the own aesthetic drive. No contradiction exists between the most basic impulse and the most arcane creation.

The artist’s total engagement should be met by the spectator’s : in this way, the latter, assuming his responsibility towards himself and the artist, can be transformed and leave the audience in a way, unexperienced before.

‘I have a dream : to present a gloriously complex being, elusive in its style, undefinable in its emotions, always in metamorphosis, endlessly sensitive’.

Pé Vermeersch