Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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Edgar
Davids of the Netherlands, fighting a duel with Milan Baros, Czech
Republic. Stupidly, I agreed to this invitation from the NZZ Folio. Now
I'm supposed to explain why the Netherlands are going to win the World
Cup, and to be honest, I have no idea how they could. We have fabulous
football players with tremendous abilities but we have no national
eleven. It might be that teams are born during tournaments and the
strength of Dutch footballers is certainly their ability to develop
team spirit in the relative isolation of the training camp. But winning
the World Cup?
Not long ago I was looking at an old photo of the
glorious Ajax Amsterdam team of the 1970s. Everyone of them looked like a killer.
They all had legendary skills, but they also all had something
extremely malevolent and revengeful about them; anyone who dared to take
them on must fear for their lives. It was the Ajax trainer of the
time Rinus Michel who coined the expression "football is war". His team
looked like a death squad, trained in the wild forests of the Caucasus.
These football players could survive anywhere because they could catch
wild boar with their bare hands and rip them to shreds with their
teeth. These men wanted to see blood spurting at the goal posts and wouldn't be able to relax until they'd quartered their opponents.
No,
from me there will be no talk of the elegant game of football as a
variation of ballet. For me football is a form of applied terror. I
remember one Ajax game, where the opponents lay whimpering on the
ground begging for forgiveness. But the word forgiveness did not
feature in the dictionaries of the Ajax players, if they even had
dictionaries. They would fight their way to the superior position, and
with that achieved, the game could really get going: the opponents
would be tormented, insulted, dismantled and banished to the
psychoanalyst's couch for the rest of their days.
I confess to
really enjoying the humiliations dealt out by Ajax. It was all about
power and the eternal subjugation of the loser. Can our footballers
today still humiliate others? How malicious and hungry do you have to
be, to fight to the last breath, to be incapable of finding peace until the
last drop of your opponent's blood has been sucked dry? Yes, I'm a fan
of Chelsea and Barcleona too. They play beautiful football, but
football is war, no, football has to be the ultimate thermo-nuclear
eruption on a 110 x70 metre stretch of grass. And a football team has
to be a killer commando of sadistic soldiers. From my mouth will come
no criticism of the gladiators of ancient Rome.
What was it
the NZZ Folio wanted from me? Why will the Netherlands win the World
Cup? Because our coach Marco van Basten puts our players on bread and
water. Because he shows them photos of their women running off with
lithe Latin lovers. Because he holds photos under their noses showing
their houses burning and their Maseratis and Lamborghinis being
destroyed by vandals. And then he lets them out onto the pitch. That's
why we'll be world champions.
*
Leon
de Winter is a writer who lives in Amsterdam. His book "Place de la
Bastille" (Diogenes 2005) was recently published in German.
This article forms part of compilation of writings originally published in the Neue Zürchner Zeitung magazine Folio on May 2, 2006.
Translation: lp.
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