Click - Pause - Silence One of my first choreographic efforts (1970) was entitled “Kommen und Gehen’ (Come and Go) - At that time, the significance of this title was not totally clear to me – and it still isn’t – and most probably it never will…. The mystery of people entering our life, becoming a part of it, and ‘disappearing’, is perhaps an element of our life that moves us most - But our own emergence into our ‘conscious life’ and our journey is even more puzzling. We hear the click of a camera, which captures a moment of our life. The result is a photograph, which is silent and motionless, while we are alive. But when we die, this photograph will come to life, break its silence, and speak to the ones, who come after us. “Click - Pause - Silence” was conceived as a farewell perfor- mance for a very fine dancer - Elke Schepers -, who has decided to finish her dancing career. The work itself is a meditation on the value of our physical, artistic and spiritual energy and legacy, which streams through our body while we are alive. But it also asks the question: ”What will be remembered”? The fact, that we are born at all, and acquire all the properties, which are totally unique to ourselves only, is an inexplicable miracle. And I find it important, that we do not only accept our uniqueness, but also that we use it, in order to give our artistic statement a deeply personal and original value. If we want to reach and touch people, all our actions must come from our deeply felt integrity, conviction and honesty. Only then, the hearts of our spectators will open.
In the musical composition, created for this choreography, we have used the music of Bach, who was regarded as “old fashioned” by his contemporaries. But he was a strange kind of a genius, who has managed to tame our emotional chaos, and gave it a form, structure and architecture, unsurpassed to this very day. He gave his music a mathematical order, and created equations, which gave his compositions a unique balance and a sense of inevitability. He understood, that emotions in a work of art, become much stronger, when they are given a clear line and form. He left to us a legacy, which is totally convincing, soothing and reassuring. The composer Dirk Haubrich and myself have separated the elements of Bach’s “Präludium nr. 24 in b” from “Das Wohltemperierte Klavier”. We have put Bach’s composition under a microscope, taken a scalpel, cut it apart, and threw all its elements into space. From that chaos we have created new links and structures - new music…. The building blocks of “Click, Pause, Silence” are "simple": They "only" represent Chaos, Order, Catharsis, Conviction, Integrity and Uncertainty.(Uncertainty and Conviction, meaning and representing all our burnt energy, all the spent emotions, and all the other things, which we leave behind when we go!) It is a well known fact, that people have a short memory, but we should nevertheless try to live (and dance) in a way, which will make our “footprints” difficult to forget, and that the people who have crossed our path, will remember us for some time to come, and preferably for a good reason !!! Jiří Kylián - The Hague, March 23, 2008