Date: 13/09/2006
Place: His house, dining room table

- abstract:
Jeroen Peeters moved to Brussels because of professional and personal reasons. Living in Brussels demands a personal investment of him. It disturbs him that public life is badly organized and that the city is so segregated. Part of the city is like a ghost town outside office hours because of the many commuters. The Brussels dance and performance field on the contrary is fairly well organized with its system of government funding and production facilities. He would like to see politicians and inhabitants care about the city.
As a critic, he went through an evolution from less to more personal, from less to more involved. When he started, he believed in writing from an ‘objective, neutral position’. When he got to know people from the dance field and started to follow the work of some artists who really interested him, he became more personal and involved. As a consequence of this evolution, critical writing and dramaturgy came to overlap sometimes. When he moved to Brussels and worked here as a critic, he felt very much part of a particular generation/community. His beginning as a critic in Brussels coincided with the first generator of PARTS and the large companies were on the rise. However, this community exploded into many sub-communities when people started to do projects on their own and many dancers from abroad became attracted to Brussels as a dance metropole. He refers to Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘foamification of reality’ when he describes this accumulation of sub-communities as ‘foam’ or ‘bubbles’. Within a community he distinguishes different levels, from long-standing collaborations to casual acquaintances. Interesting in this respect is the idea that a community is not in the first place something you feel or believe to be part of, but a category others regard you to be part of and that is therefore something that exists through the perception of others.
Jeroen Peeters says he has a sense of artistic freedom. He is able to consciously map out his own path and has the freedom to accept only those invitations that fit into his trajectory. He tries to choose projects that are connected to what he already does. Networking is an obligatory and active part of his professional life: he has to create contacts and opportunities for future projects. In the interview, Peeters also describes how his work as a dance critic was the foundation of his work as a curator and dramaturge: his interest in certain artists lead to several artistic collaborations.

investment in a social life – small student town – ‘traditional disinterested critic’ – laboratories – interwoven – aware of the scene – first generations of P.A.R.T.S. – totally exploded – bubbles – lobby contacts – density – few hundreds – physician – charged with expectations – curator - dispersed activities – autonomous track - visuality – consistency - politics – moulding activity - social context – temper – modular trajectory as a writer – from 10 in the morning till midnight – content discussion – questionnaires – intoxication – violent fever - Selbstversuch