Bram Vreeswijk

Bram Vreeswijk studied photography, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the Hague, and following Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He finished this last study in 2001, cum laude, with a thesis investigating similarities between Western advertising and magic-religious practises in so called ‘primitive’ societies (as described in anthropological literature).

Since that time he works as an artist. In the beginning especially in the field of video, but his worked developped more and more in the direction of dance and performance art. He studied dance / movement with Katarina Bakatsaki (body weather), Rob List and Pauline de Groot, did solo–performances and worked together with, amongs others Seon-ja Seo, Nicolas Rapaic (The Dutch National Ballet), Angela Köhnlein, en Alfredo Fernandez. With the last he worked recently as a dramaturg for a performance of ‘The Kiss Moves’.

His artistic work almost always goes together with philosophical research. He has been occupied for several years with the ‘Inner Experience’ of Georges Bataille and recently he gets inspired by amongst others the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenology) and Buddhism.

What is the theme/goal of your project and how did it come about?
The goal of ‘Dance-Experience-Watch’ is to explore methods for the ‘articulation’ of the visual and physcial experience of dance – making it ‘explicit’ (conscious, workable) by using images or language. Concretely I will focus on the repertory of Emio Greco | PC, and the question concerning the ‘essences’ of their dance vocabulary.

Theoretically I will depart from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenology) and the philosophical debate on ‘Mimesis’ (imitation, the perception of similarities). At the moment I presume that the dancer and the observer, in some way or another, experience, during the dance, the same differently. The dancer and the observer share the fact that they have/are human bodies. This raises questions about the correspondences and differences between the moving and the observing body, the body that is trained in dance and the body that is untrained or trained differently.

To my conviction this researche touches on the essence of what is happening during dance-performances, and I hope it could contribute to the development of new dance material. Apart from this I hope that the research will generate material that invites the audience to get more involved in dance, to study it.

For me the question of the relationship between visual and physical perception has been a subject in my thinking since Seon-ja Seo asked me, as a videomaker, to create a ‘visual echo’ for her solo ‘Under-presence’. In our workingproces we came to the conclusion that this ‘visual echo’ (abstract image-material) should not so much be based on what I saw, but on what I physically experienced while watching her solo.

What do you want to achieve/learn/try with this project and through the collaboration with ICK.
In the collaboration with ICKamsterdam I see an opportunity to explore the above in relation to a specific, and clear dance vocabulary namely that of Emio Greco | PC. Besides I am looking forward to the dialogue that will, hopefully, develop between the methods of articulation that I propose and the existing discourse (in regard to the production of dance, dance-research, dance-notation etc.) within ICK.
To conclude with, I would like to find open forms of presentation for this project that could appeal to both a specialised and a more general public. My ideal is not, as a scientist, to do a research and write a text with a clear conclusion, but to realise forms of presentation of research-material, that invite to common reflection, communication and eventually the production of new material (words, images and dance).

Where do you yourself (as an artist) in the future?
In the future I hope to be, probably in Amsterdam, in as much a possible different ways, and from different angles, busy with the production, perception and articulation of performance art.
A question I hope to study more in regard to this (which is not yet an explicit subject in the research I here propose) is how conciousness of our perceiving and moving bodies could contribute to our emotional and spiritaul health.