- abstract:
Jeroen Peeters moved to Brussels because of professional and personal
reasons. Living in Brussels demands a personal investment of him. It
disturbs him that public life is badly organized and that the city is so
segregated. Part of the city is like a ghost town outside office hours
because of the many commuters. The Brussels dance and performance field on
the contrary is fairly well organized with its system of government funding
and production facilities. He would like to see politicians and inhabitants
care about the city.
As a critic, he went through an evolution from less to more personal, from
less to more involved. When he started, he believed in writing from an
‘objective, neutral position’. When he got to know people from the
dance field and started to follow the work of some artists who really
interested him, he became more personal and involved. As a consequence of
this evolution, critical writing and dramaturgy came to overlap sometimes.
When he moved to Brussels and worked here as a critic, he felt very much
part of a particular generation/community. His beginning as a critic in
Brussels coincided with the first generator of PARTS and the large
companies were on the rise. However, this community exploded into many
sub-communities when people started to do projects on their own and many
dancers from abroad became attracted to Brussels as a dance metropole. He
refers to Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘foamification of reality’ when he
describes this accumulation of sub-communities as ‘foam’ or
‘bubbles’. Within a community he distinguishes different levels, from
long-standing collaborations to casual acquaintances. Interesting in this
respect is the idea that a community is not in the first place something
you feel or believe to be part of, but a category others regard you to be
part of and that is therefore something that exists through the perception
of others.
Jeroen Peeters says he has a sense of artistic freedom. He is able to
consciously map out his own path and has the freedom to accept only those
invitations that fit into his trajectory. He tries to choose projects that
are connected to what he already does. Networking is an obligatory and
active part of his professional life: he has to create contacts and
opportunities for future projects. In the interview, Peeters also describes
how his work as a dance critic was the foundation of his work as a curator
and dramaturge: his interest in certain artists lead to several artistic
collaborations.