Date: 1/11/2006
Place: Eleanor's bedroom

Pierre Rubio has been living in Brussels since ‘93. He is not sure what his home is: Brussels or the South of France where he was born. He came here as a dancer but started creating his own work in 2002. During the last couple of years, he learnt the profession of choreographing and developed his own dance language. After a retreat in which he did a lot of research and worked on his own dance language, he is again ready to present work. For a dancer, it is easier to live off dance than for a choreographer; he often found himself paying his dancers and technicians but not himself. Although the artist status protects him, he is poor and works a lot for free: preparing and organizing the work, composing, doing administration, accounting… He is obsessed by his work, which means that life and work conflate to a certain extent. In the next five years, he would like to have more possibilities to work, to collaborate with others and to be free to create the work he wants. Rubio feels most invisible when he is with his family because they do not understand what he is or does. In Brussels, it is hard to become invisible because the town is so small.
Pierre Rubio feels part of a global community of individuals who are exploring the relationship between the body and language like him. He calls it ‘the country of re-invention’: people who are able to re-invent themselves and their civilization. Dance is an ideal medium to re-invent the world. To stay in the dance community, Rubio ‘deepens’ his work language and his knowledge about the history of contemporary dance. He wants to understand what others did before, what they wrote and thought. There exists also a larger dance field where the only link between people is that they have the same profession. It is not a real community because there is little sharing and a lot of competition. A community should be based on sharing and not on superficial talks in foyers. Rubio used to regret it that the dance community is not one big happy family, but he is not naive anymore. He knows how to behave in this field, he learnt how to smile and say hello. This bigger dance community is divided in a ‘conceptual’ and an ‘experiential’ clique and he belongs to neither one of them. Rubio is convinced that if there would be ten times as much infrastructure and funding, the atmosphere in the dance community would not be so grim. But now it is a competitive jungle where people fight over the limited means. Within this larger dance field, he feels part of a very small community of like-minded choreographers. They exchange about each other’s performances, the politics of presenting, art criticism etc. He calls it his ‘intellectual family’. When he first arrived in Brussels, the dance field looked completely different: PARTS did not exist yet, and you were expected to choose either the profession of dancer, researcher or choreographer. That situation has evolved and nowadays you are not ‘complete’ when you are not able to make choreographies and reflect and write about dance at the same time. Versatility has become a sign of competence instead of incompetence these days.

South of France – picked up – American techniques – revolution – edit – responsible – mother/father choreographer – new jacket – props – bilingual association – torture – patience – research – global – clique – dogmatic – destroy one’s reputation – food chain – vortex – inflation – revenge – resonances – colleagues – quite obsessed – associate – site-specific – seashore – dance language – deepen – retreat – lecture – history of dance – re-invention – emptiness – Champs Elysées – public exposure – ‘raté’ – paranoid – confident – intellectual family – machine-bodies/ body-machines – painful – different rooms - voices