Benno Premsela

Speed is often mistakenly seen as meaning fast, but the snail also has speed. Speed is like temperature or wind: it can be high or it can be low. Perhaps it is my personal interest in counter-currents, in going against the grain, but what fascinates me most in speed is not how fast we can go, but how slow.

Only when we slow down we can view things in proper perspective. When I look out of the window of a fast car, I cannot really look at the landscape. All I can see is a high speed blur, speeding by. Only at slower speeds I can experience and enjoy my surroundings. For me the speed of experience and the speed of the human body go hand in hand. For the body, the actual speeds of the movement does not tell the whole story. In a piece by the Netherlands Dance Theatre, made by Hans van Maanen, our famous choreographer, the actual dance is only 25 seconds long, but I can show it to you slowed down by a factor of 10. As dancers know all too well from experience, the high speed of the movement will make the body adjust in a particular way -- that is how the dancers have to balance their bodies and tilt over, because they are running so fast. If they would really move at the same slow speed which we can view in a slow motion video, they would move in a completely different way. It reminds us that in human perception and human experience bodily speed is not simply a matter of fast and slow. It is just about the physical velocity of movement, slow speed and fast speed embody different sensibilities.

The second video piece I am showing you has also to do with slowness. It is the limit to speed, if you wish: how slow can the human body move without actually standing still or falling down. The following piece is based on the 'Adagio for Hammerklavier' by Beethoven. Aschenbach, the famous pianist, long ago played this piece four minutes longer than Beethoven indicated. Hans van Maanen again interpreted the piece. He has always been interested in the moment that the whoop, after being set in motion, is slowing down to a standstill before it falls down. This dance is about the moment between stationary and falling down. The dancers balance between just moving and not yet falling over. Neither in motion nor stationary they show us the slowest human movement possible. The dancers balance between time and timelessness.