Alinea
72
Driving back from Paris, the dancers and I caught a ride with the musician Ed de Vos to Rotterdam, with the intention of taking the train from there to Amsterdam. But just after we’d crossed the border into Holland, the engine started to smoke, and we got out of the car which was in the middle of the highway, and we all pushed it to the emergency lane by the side of the highway. Ed started walking to a roadside phone, this was in the time of pre mobile phones, and every kilometre along the highway there was a yellow post with a phone to call for help. It was late at night when we arrived at the studio, where the dancers could collect their belongings that had been transported with the decor in the other car.
The planning was that performance would continue to be on stage for a whole year, and we started working on a longer version with an extra dancer. We called the production the Trilogy, or the full name “TC and the Trilogy." At the final performance of this version in a gallery in Den Bosch, the director of the Academy of Arts approached us and asked if we could bring the production to the manifestation they hold at the Academy every year. To my surprise he’d been to all of our performances, no matter where they were. He thought it would be important for the students to see it as well. He also asked me if I’d be willing to teach at the Academy.
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t have time for it. At this time I not only started working with a musical group as a choreographer, I also bought my video and started scripting for videos, the type of art I’ve been doing since. When I’d just bought the video, I practically lived with it day and night. I made all sorts of clips, combining music and visual, whatever idea occurred to me that I could realise.
I had raised the funds for the videocamera, which at the time cost 10,000 guilders, by making earrings that I sold in boutiques and on the Queen's birthday. That’s the day when all of Amsterdam turned into a market. I’d been building a supply for a few months beforehand, and on the day I made several thousand just from 4 boards full of earrings with different patterns and different colour combinations. I put them in categories, and I worked with 3 people as a sales team. One took them out of the boards, one got the money and returned the change, and I filled empty places on the boards.
I’d started making the earrings when I didn't have enough money to pay the rent of the studio, which wasn’t even that much. I and my partner had exactly 100 guilders to live on for a whole month, and there was no income in sight. So, I asked a boutique owner I knew, by the name Lutz. What might sell in his boutique. He told me to make earrings, "They will sell," he said. "But how many earrings will I have to sell to pay the studio?" I asked. He told me that I’d be in for a surprise, and that he trusted me to make earrings that would sell easily.
So, I took the last money we had and I bought materials. I used a type of plastic that had just come on the market, working all night until morning, and put the earrings in bags. Then I set out to sell them. On the first street I went to, between the Newmarket and the Dam Square, in the center of Amsterdam, I went into a couple of shops. After that I’d already ran out of earrings, I’d sold them all and I tripled my money. So again I went to buy more plastic, more little bags, more hooks and rings. I worked all night, and again, the day after, I sold everything.
I started making different designs, and I made a kind of catalog so that the owners of the shops could tell me what they wanted. With some of them I started working regularly. I paid the rent, as well as part of the production of "TC and the Trilogy," and then I bought the video equipment, but I didn’t plan to continue making earrings, even when I was approached by some guy who worked for a big company that made jewellery. They had difficulties mass producing the copies they made from my earrings, and he asked if I would work for them to solve these issues, and that’s after they’d blatantly stolen the designs I made. I told them, no.
There was also a company that sold the earrings in New York, which wanted me to start producing them on a steady basis. I asked them, "How much do they think I can create with two hands?" I didn't want to set up an earring factory, and within only a few years the market would be flooded with products from Asia, ending any kind of industry of this kind in countries where the living costs were higher. I just didn't follow the money. When it was enough, it was enough. Until again there wasn't enough. I wasn't exactly worried.
Although Lutz with his boutique had got me to start making earrings, I never reached his shop as I sold out on the way. A few years later I opened my own shop with someone else who wanted to make his own design objects. He rented the shop to have a place to live in, and the part that was open to the public we called Alinea. Only after a year of me running between the musical rehearsals in different buildings in parts of the city, as well as working with my own group doing rehearsals in the studio, and working all nights making earrings for the boutiques I worked with on a regular basis, sitting in the shop was too much. So, after a year, we closed the shop. Neither of us wanted to sit there.
In that time dark clouds were gathering in the skies above the world of experimental theatre, with the problems of the performing arts department shifting funds away from it, in order to spread the money to productions that were outside the big cities, what the Dutch call the “polder", the countryside, not that there are so many artists there, but that's where they decided to shift the money to.
I was approached by three young people, two guys and a woman, who’d written original lyrics for a musical about Mozes going out of Egypt and crossing the receded water. All original from them. They’s applied for funding to have hundred people on stage and they got it! So they went to Amsterdam to look for a director and a choreographer, and they chose me because I was listed in the directory for both, so they would only have to pay one salary for the two functions. I did meet them, with my assistant of those days, to get acquainted with the project before I gave my answer. They had planned rehearsals for about a year with a break in the middle for the summer vacation, and they thought that one person could do the geography as well as direction for hundred amateurs on stage, without assistants, and within the planned time period. It was a result of money going to the "polder." I wished them good luck, but I told them that no professional would take on the project because it is not realistic. They promised to call me every now and then to keep me updated on where they are with the project.
They couldn't find anyone to direct and choreograph the musical, and they called to tell me that they decided not to do the project. In the meantime the subsidies for the small theatres that showed experimental theatre, stopped, and with that there were no more subsidies for groups that brought this genre to the stage, leading to one group after another quitting as the only possible payment was a percentage of ticket sales.
I didn't think it would have an effect on the performances I did because after all, I didn't work with subsidies, and I didn't bother to check how much money could actually be collected from ticket sales. So, I started with a new production that I called "The Cage."