Vanguard

You studied economics, how did you get into the creative business?

I found myself working as a choreographer, knowing little about dance or any other art form from which I could make the lateral leap into dance. So I started out using my body as my primary – and music as my secondary – material. In reality, I began to compose, which is something that had interested me since I was a child. As had organizing a group, which was something I’d undertake with those first childhood shows in the courtyard of our apartment block.

A little later, we made an entire neighbourhood out of cardboard-box houses; it was like a huge installation. Looking at old photographs, I realized that every single game I played as a child was staged as a performance.

Why dance rather than any other art form?

My relationship to my body. I was not interested in words, but movement was always of fundamental importance to me; which is how I ended up choreographing my first work and setting up the Oktana company. When I graduated from the State School of Dance in 1993 – as a dancer, because there was no choreo-graphy department back then – it was fairly inevitable that I should enter a period of research. As ...