Rob List [1946] is a performer and choreographer working in Europe for the last twenty years. In the early 1980's he toured internationally in the avant-garde theater and film productions of Ping Chong and Meredith Monk, as well as performing his own movement theater work at La Mama and the Kitchen in New York. In 1985 he was invited to become artistic director of the national mimeschool in Amsterdam, a post he held until 1990. From 1987-1993 he co-founded and directed the Institute for New Dramaturgy which presented workshops in interdisciplinary composition by artists, architects, dancers and filmmakers in Eastern and Western Europe.

Since 1990 Rob List has continued his solo performance career, creating a unique stage language and movement style in works such as The Figure Series [90-94], Double Series [95-99], Still Life Series [96-00] and The Folly Series [00-03]. These are minimal movement pieces based on subjects and ideas from the visual arts, science and architecture. He has performed these in theaters, galleries and international festivals in Europe and the US. In the fall of 2008 he presented a new solo work, Still Not So Long Ago.

Since 2002 Rob List has been working with young dancers, artists and filmmakers in a ever-changing ensemble called OZU, developing choreography which emphasizes solo movement performance in Struik and Struweel [02], Feuillee [03], Bosschage [04] and Ne Scio [05]. For the past few years he has also choreographed and collaborated ith many young dancers and theatermakers. In the spring of 2007 he was movement advisor to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in the making of her solo ‘Keeping Still pt. 1’.

Rob List has also created a company of young dance teachers who perform specially-created pantomime for senior citizen's centers throughout the Netherlands. The program called Sprookjesboom (Folk Tales) premiered in the Utrecht region in the summer of 2006.

Rob List has received a number of awards for his work, including the 1997 Dutch Theater Directors Award and a 2002 Kunstprijs from the city of Amsterdam for his entire oeuvre. He was a 2004 Fulbright Scholar and a former recipient of an NEA Choreographic Fellowship.



In my work I want to create an elementary theater removed of all psychological elements, a performance space that evokes a more basic moment in human communication - one without text, characters, or socially coded gestures - and which affects the audience in an emotional way without their quite being able to identify what is going on. This work is grounded in an active stillness in which the viewer's perceptions are reactivated outside the context of daily life. My work strives not to be a representation of human experience but rather a source of it, more akin to listening to music or looking at painting, but without being merely a formal aesthetic experience. In my performances the human being is an anonymous everyman whose eyes and ears share the same sensations as those of the audience, in a communal and elemental experience.

In my work a person moves in stillness with their back turned away from the viewer. Though the movements are deliberate, the gestures are ambiguous and unrecognizable; they do not refer to another reality. Instead the movement pieces I create highlight the condition of temporality. On the one hand the realization that the present moment is continually receding into the past; and on the other the continual state of suspense created by expectation - the moment where the present meets the future. The sculptor Richard Serra once remarked that memory and anticipation are the ‘motors’ of perception. The tension between them is also the driving force behind my performances.

I see my work as a critique of the language and ideology of representation, in which the audience must constantly analyze, interpret and make judgments. In the theater every gesture and action onstage seems to provoke the question “What does this mean?” I wish instead to return to a more elementary starting point in the theater: the body alone in space, which through sheer presence continuously actualizes the here and now, activating the space and making it concrete and palpable. My work is a form of research into this ‘quality of the living present’ and how it can develop into a choreography.

This work is also an implicit critique of the mediated eye, which edits and rejects that which is not ‘important’ - reducing the world to a two-dimensional frame and restricting perception of the world around. In the 21st century the virtual has become a challenge to the actual, in which the nature of the ‘real’ is increasingly called into question. In my work instead I wish only to appeal to the direct senses and perceptions of the viewer of the world around them as they watch and listen.

In general I tend to seek inspiration for my work in the visual arts, especially its various discourses and techniques. In a number of my performances I draw or paint as an action. I perform in galleries and museums as well as theaters. My work is often described as ‘minimal’ since I use so few elements – no text, coded gestures or facial expressions; no costume, makeup, narrative or storyline. Often the work is presented in daylight or without theatrical lighting. Although I do not consider myself to be a minimalist, I do see my work as a redevelopment of minimalist sculpture, whose major achievement since the 60s has not been its ‘economy’ so much as its creation of an ‘active space.’ The fundamental perception of this kind of work has shifted from the art object itself to a heightened awareness of the space in which the object is exhibited. The space which includes the form - instead of only the form itself - has become a major source of minimal art’s power and beauty. In my own performance work, where the human body itself is the form, I wish to use the body’s unique status as both a figure and a signifier to evoke this active space in my performance.

                                                                                         ------ Rob List