technique, or where we dive into one idea about the body, linked always with the creative work of that artist. And it's been a total mind opener when we're talking about diversity. There's so many techniques, and ways of working on choreography and technique. This is important to understand that 70% of all the teachers were guest teachers. And most of them would come from the New York downtown arts community. And within that the AIDS crisis was really big in New York at that time. So a lot of teachers who would come would introduce methods of grief, or stories about people who were dying. There was a whole different understanding of urgency. It was very clear that a teacher would maybe not come back next year, because he might be dead. A very influential person in this respect was Yoshiko Chuma, a Japan born choreographer who has lived in New York since the early ‘70s. She invited me into a student-project that was travelling New York in the early ‘90s. And one of the teachers that she would bring to Arnhem was Harry Shepard. They travelled together to Arnhem by the plane from New York, and he had disclosed to Yoshiko that his T-cell rate was very low. And so he flew to Arnhem, and he got sick in Arnhem, and he died in a hospital in Arnhem within two weeks. Shocking. I grew up in a city where I was active in an AIDS-help Centre in the late ‘80s. So I was one of the students who would not be afraid of touch – I knew the way the infection would transmit – so I was taking care of Harry during the time.

… the AIDS crisis was really big in New York at that time. So teachers who came would introduce methods of grief, or stories about people who were dying.
There was a whole different understanding of urgency.  

Peter
An initial story is me being asked as a student in 1991 to make my first solo work, and I had no idea what to make. I was kind of blank, so I locked myself into the newly established video archive of EDDC and I watched every single tape of that archive.
And it was really incredible – this was a whole new world: seeing other people, seeing work that has been done in the last years. Meeting people that I had never seen or heard of. It was an incredible teaching – just to be in the archive for a week and watch everything. And one of the tapes that I found, I'm still using in my teaching, which is called Variety Show. It's duets of all the teachers that were teaching in the summer of 1988, in SNDO. And it's just an incredible document of teaching methods and aesthetics in one tape. So this video material in the ‘90s was starting to become important. But also in the beginning of the 90s was the start of dance as a research field. Susan Leigh Foster started her first Ph. D programme for dance history and research. And so there was a growing interest in researching and books about dance. One of my colleagues from Arnhem, Karen Schaffman, would be one of the first students to do a PhD in University of Riverside. I asked her to send me all her reading lists, and then I started this search for these books. The internet was young – it was really difficult to find books on dance and dance history. And it was really difficult and expensive to get them. So in the late ‘90s, coming to Berlin, I really made a lot of effort to hunt for books. And in 2005, Tanzfabrik invited me to make a solo, and the only solo I wanted to make was one where I worked with my acquired library. At that time, I had about 60 dance books. I brought them into the studio in Möckernstraße for four weeks, and I lived,and read, and rolled, and danced with the books. And out of this came a solo called Choreographing Books, and I performed it for more then 10 years. I brought that piece to the places I taught: in HZT Berlin and the MA in Arnhem, and many other schools and theatres. And out of this, also some other teaching usually emerges.

The interest in making a book on recent dance history of Berlin is always there. But it always fails on the immensity of people that are actually here doing something. It becomes quite a huge, multi-layered, multi-focused situation and it's really complicated and difficult. A lot of people don't want a certain telling, they want a bouquet of tellings. This is what I wanted in Tanztage, which is another archive. I curated Tanztage for seven years, and within my seven years we had the 20th edition. For the 20th edition, we reprinted all the programmes from the past 20 years. It was an incredible archive of plurality. There were people who had not made it, or who left Berlin, or who changed professions and other who are big now and had their first shows during Tanztage. But even these pathways are so diverse and mysterious. It's just hard to put a finger on. There is Tanznacht Berlin, an initiative of Tanzfabrik, and it used to be every two years. And for one of the editions in 2012 I worked together with Andrea Keiz and Arianne Hoffmann to create the oral dance histories room at uferstudios. Andrea Keiz used to work for Mime Centrum, so Andrea has filmed incredible amounts of dance performances in the 2000s and Arianne Hoffmann just came to Berlin after her studies in Los Angeles and really wanted to understand Berlin's dance scene. We conducted conversations beforehand with older protagonists from the Berlin dance community. Our system of doing these interviews was meeting someone for at least three hours and doing handicraft together during these three hours conversations. We would knit or crochet together. We would sit around a table, ask some questions, and then people would start talking. Our effort was to make it long, because to some points, you only come when you have set aside all the superficial things. For the installation in the room at Uferstudios we put up a lot of photos, and all the things we crocheted and on a big table extra wool and needles for visitors to work with. So you could get headphones and listen to the recorded conversations while you were doing something with your hands. People really spent a lot of time in this room. I'm sure there's still a lot of data in those <recordings>.
For Visible Undercurrent in 2014, I visited both archives of my former school (EDDC in Arnhem) which is unfortunately not taken care of – it's really a loss, and SNDO Amsterdam, they have an incredible archive that is very well taken care of, and the same woman is in charge who has been in charge since the late ‘80s. She knew immediately where things were, and she had knowledge of how it got there.

… these interviews was meeting someone for at least three hours and doing handicraft together during these three hours conversations.

… my work with the archive, my work with people dead or still alive, is quoting them or what I learned from them.

with very different things and aspects. We're dealing with formality, cross dressing, dance history, philosophy, literature, with who we are as people". So we made a piece where for an hour and fifteen minutes, we explained to the audience who we are, what we're doing, showing examples of videos, doing a short history lecture, reconstructing something that Trisha Brown had done, reconstructing early Contact Improvisation. And then we dressed in costumes, and we did ten minutes of our improvisational dance, and the audience was always very touched to get tools to read it in a very different way. I think it's brave and great to break the dichotomies; this is dance, and this is talking about dance. I think that's maybe part of the education, that if you're an artist, you're not fixed on a form or system.

… if you're an artist, you're not fixed on a form or system.