Interview

Interview Maarten Inghels

As a dancer, I see choreographies everywhere around me. Intricate group pieces emerging in the middle of traffic-filled streets, duets created by trees in the wind or the ensemble of a flock of birds in the sky. Whether there is movement or just compositions emerging in daily life, dance is all around us. Just like language, this artform wants to tell stories, ask questions, call out wrongdoings and so much more. Dance has the desire to conversate, but sometimes I don’t manage to find the point of expressing a message with my dancing alone. Even though 93 percent of our communication is transmitted through motions, we are used to listen to words instead of movements. In moments like that I love to play around with poetry. The movements of words in the air, purposely connected, not a word out of place; it almost feels like dancing.

Just like dance, poetry is an indirect way of conversating, there is an extra layer written behind the words. Poetry moves emotionally and physically, what makes it comand a bit more effort to understand. As a dancer looking for other ways to involve my audience, I had a conversation with Maarten Inghels, about his work and career as a writer and poet. Together we discussed his process of creating new poems and his habits in this area. But most of all, I was interested in his awareness of movement in spoken or written language, especially poetry. At first, the bridge between dance and poetry seemed immensely long. Inghels started off with expressing his fear of the distance between our practices. He stated: “If I was a dancer I would stay in the background between the curtains, barely on stage. I would like to be visible a bit but also be invisible so play with the curtains I would say. But it turned out, Maarten Inghels and I had some similarities in our creative processes. After half an hour of talking Inghels mentioned his work process starting from a performance or ‘walk’ he had undertaken, to gain inspiration for his writings. He said: “Poetry is not enough for me; I feel better in the in-between zones.”

The main topic we talked about was the presence of rhythm and movement in poetry. Just like dancers search for the right movement to continue a phrase, poets search for the perfect word. Inghels said: “When I write, I read a lot out loud so I can hear the rhythm and see if the sentences move perfectly. Sometimes you use another word that just works better in the rhythm.” To find the right rhythm for each sentence, Inghels explained how he wasn’t a fan of meters because of the robotic sound it created. He prefers to trust his instinct and follow the feeling of the moment. But rhythm is not the hardest part of poetry according to Maarten Inghels. It is the need to create a whole tiny universe in every sentence you write. There is no space for unnecessary conjunctions to fill up a poem. Just like dance, if you want the overall result to come across, you don’t have space for unnecessary padding. Each movement needs to have a reason or urgency behind it, otherwise the piece, and especially the message behind it, loses value.

Another interesting point that came up was Maarten Inghels’ visibility-invisibility theory. According to this theory, every human has two desires. On one hand we want to be seen, to be famous, to mean something in the world, to interact with each other. Overall to be visible. But at the same time, we want to be invisible, to hide, to flee, to be ordinary, almost mundane. It is the interaction between the two opposites that interests him the most in his work. “Everything I make can be categorised between these two divisions, I discovered that after ten years of doing my thing. It is something I keep loosely in mind when I work”, Inghels said. Most of the time he only realizes afterwards that a lot of his decisions in a creative process were influenced by this desire. “Sometimes when you make something, after a year you discover what it was about and what it meant in your career.” As an artist, my desire is for my work to be visible, I want my art to be something that is remembered, that is valued. But I don’t need the personal attention that comes with it. At the same time, I want to get recognition for what I make and to not be anonymous. I believe as humans we try to find a balance in life between being visible and being invisible and when you make something that desires an audience like art does, it can be hard to find your balance again.

In conclusion, I believe the difference in creative processes of dance and poetry is very minimal, or at least that is the situation between Maarten Inghels and myself. We both like to play around with different art forms, in collaboration or on its own. It turns out the two of us work with poetry and performance art only to come to a different end result, using the opposite art form as a support for our own. When it comes to his thoughts on finding or creating rhythm and movement in poetry, we again share similar views, most important is to follow your intuition and only say what you need to say without any distractions from within. But what will stay with me the most out of this research is his theory of the two human desires to be visible and to be invisible, most of all at the same time. I can still learn a lot from Inghels’ ‘je m'en fous’-approach when it comes to searching for boundaries and then pushing or even crossing them when pleased. And who knows, maybe, we meet each other again in the poetry field one day.

Everything has been said
There are no more words left to comfort
Questions turn into empty statements
answers stay unknown to us

We are children of silence
Dialogues become monologues become stares
Words no longer suffice
But it is the only thing we have
If only I could remember how to speak

Beside writing, Maarten Inghels also works as a visual artist since a couple of years. Most of his art is rooted in literature or words, so it could also be classified as more of word art. In 2018 Inghels built a raft in the shape of the word ‘water’ and floated down the Yser in West-Flanders. In six days, he travelled from the boarder of France to the sea, occasionally stopping to dock and talk to bypassers. Two years later Inghels did a similar project called Een gewichtig word. In the span of two days, he made a so-called crusade with four gigantic letters spelling out ‘time’ in Dutch. He also initiated 'The invisible route', a project where he would walk though the city of Antwerp, without being seen by cameras and publish his route on a self-made map. He later on repeated this project in the city of Hasselt.

Following the initiative of Dutch artist Frank Starik, Maarten Inghels started 'The Lonely Funeral' in Antwerp. This literary and social project aimed to establish a network of poets who would write a personal poem for a deceased person and recite this at their funeral. A last goodbye to people who get buried or cremated without presence of family or friend. To date, well over 300 'lonely funerals' have been attended by poets in both Antwerp and Amsterdam and several books have been published containing poems in Dutch, English and German.

“An artist, poet and writer who doesn’t limit himself to paper.” That is how Maarten Inghels describes himself. At the young age of 20 years old, Inghels published his first book of poetry Tumult. Suddenly he was a professional artist, a ‘real writer’. But he didn’t stop there. For two years (2016-2018) Inghels worked as the city poet of Antwerp. This is an official task of the city government in which he had to write 6 poems a year in the span of 2 years and show them to a broader audience. Here, he started scanning the boundaries of poetry and writing in general. Some of his more memorable pieces date from this period of his career. With 'Wanneer wij zomer zaaien in elkaar', Inghels wrote a poem in grass seeds on several locations throughout Antwerp. After planting, this temporary piece was left alone to merge together with her surroundings. Another prime example of pushing boundaries is the poem 'Hunger'. For this ten-sentence poem, Inghels looked for volunteers to tattoo one line. With over 600 submissions, he chose 10 people, who together embody one walking poem and are connected for a lifetime. Inghels finished his appointment as city poet with a bang. In a one-off performance, with a tank full of flammable ink and a torch pen, Inghels wrote his last poem as city poet named 'Het uur vuur' in fire. As soon as Inghels reached the end of a sentence the first word would already be disappearing. Each word would burn approximately one minute leaving a trail of ash behind.

Poetry: the dance of written language

Two years,
Four months,
Ten days,
Twelve hours,
Eleven minutes
And
Fifty-one
Fifty- two
Fifty-three
Zero
The clock restarts.
Three little lines mark the beginning.
The beginning of something old
A forgotten friend that was sitting in the shadow
Waiting for the perfect moment to present itself

I am back, he says
My friend is a he
And he is not my friend
He is my enemy
My long lost lover
My safe haven
My deepest regret
He comforts me
Strokes my skin and leaves his mark of forgiveness
He reminds me to always push further and go deeper
He is always there
I want him gone

The clock restarts
But we don’t go back to the beginning
Three lines and many more spit me in the face
There is no going back
There is only the end

Writing exercise