I am not in a room

Bees with ordained fuzz – a fly whose buzzing is the last thing the poet hears before her own death – the stirring crickets performing their druidic spectral hymn in late August – and, in all the poems, a multitude of dashes that open up spaces, hint at the unsaid and activate the play of the reader’s imagination: These are entries into the poetic work of Emily Dickinson.

The team of I am not in a Room was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poems and biography for dance, music, light and figures: From the ecstasies of natural sensations, the spinning of thoughts into both material and animal, theatricalisations of the smallest movement events or the most significant moments of life and death, as well as geographical-historical references to Amherst / USA, where Dickinson lived, the artists from Taiwan, Austria and Germany create an associative web of gestures, sounds, energies, songs, spaces and contexts.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) left behind an enormously extensive oeuvre with an almost inexhaustible variety of themes, almost exclusively published posthumously. The most important female American poet almost never left her parental home throughout her life, and ultimately hardly ever received guests; she established the most intensive relationships with the world, her fellow creatures and fellow human beings practically from within her room.

Influenced by our own experiences of isolation during the lockdowns of the last couple of years, the study of Dickinson’s work leads us to further themes that are still significant today: multicultural dimensions of her thinking and poetic space, ecological aspects from a deeply felt relationship to nature, as well as questions about the individual and society that culminate in the idea of becoming one with the world.