Abke “UNISONO is not so much about loneliness but about the ability to be alone. It’s mainly about how everybody basically has the same experience – and then again, not at all, of course. But you are born and then you die, and between that there’s a kind of growth, no matter how difficult or different that growth may be. That’s sort of universal.”
Colette “Isn’t having the same experience something intangible, something we don’t know? We think we do, or we can feel it, but we don’t actually ever know exactly what it is all about. Because it always lies between our actions, between our words.”
Abke “But those actions are precisely what I want to talk about; we all very literally keep doing the same things.”
Colette “Are you trying to catch people in their recognizable actions from a photographic point of view?”
Abke “I don’t want to catch people. It's just the way it is. I’m often in New York, and it’s so crowded there that you can see all these patterns and routines very clearly. When the light turns green, it’s not just two people crossing the street, but hordes. Those are really big movements. Loneliness, silence, the unknown, doing the same thing without being aware of it… I’m very interested in that.”
(…)
Colette “What does UNISONO mean for you?”
Abke “Unisono is for instance different voices making one sound, or different people dancing the same routine. After having done a big production like Hamlet versus Hamlet, I really wanted to do something on my own, something very small. My starting point is, ‘If I present a routine that more people go through on my own, what happens and what does that look like?’ I’m now working on the question of how to do several people or several routines in a solo. It above all comes down to my body. It’s going to be a very physical performance.”
Colette “Have you already written the script?”
Abke “I’m writing a lot less for this production than I usually do. I like to take my time when I write. But I want to do this production with fewer words because it’s about the visuals.”
Colette “That sounds very musical, actually.”
Abke “All I can say right now is that I’m still searching, that everything is developing, that it won’t have too many words… but if necessary, there will be tonnes of words. I don’t actually know yet. But I definitely am writing in a different way than usual.”
