Personality in Performance

I like teaching dancers. I am a difficult teacher in the sense that I refuse to teach tricks. I only want to work with the material the students offer. If they don't want to propose work, we, the students and me, have hard times. I am a bad teacher when they force me to keep the workshop going, I just let it go and do nothing to keep them going. They have to propose material and I help and teach them to deliver it in an open, straight, personal way.

As a theatre director I work with texts, theatre plays or any possible material – diaries, papers, novels, poetry, letters. I teach the students to use and speak texts in an easy way. I want to show the personality, the personal strength, to reveal the techniques how to deliver what you want to say, what you say, by confronting the audience openly.

I prefer to work with motivitated people who present their own texts and want to work on it by themselves.
And that the texts are of the kind that one likes them or thinks them important (in other words that one wants to say something with it). They do not need necessarily be Theatre texts, it can be any text, from journals, magazines,novels, poetry, diary, scientific, philosophical, aso. They can be in any language and be spoken in any language, but they should provide a translation in english or german of the content that everybody can follow where it is about.

The Dutch theatre director Jan Ritsema has directed a wide variety of Dutch and Belgian theatre companies ranging from established repertory to staged stories to performances devised in collaboration with dancers and actors and, most recently, to opera. For the last twelve years he has been based at the Belgian Het Kaaitheater in Brussels. He created his dance "Pour la fin du temps" when he was fifty, a one hour solo he performed with a live music quartet. Jan Ritsema has been a teacher at P.A.R.T.S since its foundation. With "Weak Dance Strong Questions" Jonathan Borrows & Jan Ritsema are guests at ImPulsTanz 2002.