• THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG

• (2000)

Solo performance • Research • Drowning • Raimund Hoghe

Across the year 2000, Robert began developing a body of research into ‘drowning’ as both a physical and metaphorical act. Coming directly after the two-year period of work that produced Self-Elimination (1998) and Evidence of Life After Death (1999), these new experiments and images were deliberately less constructed, more instinctive - concerned with what the body can, or cannot, do.

As part of this process, and supported by a year-long Live Art Development Agency bursary, Robert was mentored by German choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, journalist and author Raimund Hoghe. Having also spent a decade as dramaturg at Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Raimund brought a high degree of critical rigour to his analysis of Robert’s practice, motivations, and developing work on drowning. The pair spent time together in London, Brussels, Birmingham and Düsseldorf, often accompanied by Hoghe’s artistic collaborator Luca Giacomo Schult. At the end of the mentoring period, Raimund invited Robert to take part in an event he was curating at Klapstuk in Leuven, alongside a number of artists working in the crossover space between dance, theatre and performance.

As a result, Robert presented the outcomes of his studio research as a kind of ‘sketchbook performance’, sharing his performance language in its most compressed, usually hidden form. This Is Not A Love Song revealed the underlying structure behind his larger-scale, visually layered productions.

This Is Not A Love Song led directly to Robert’s next group work, Finale (2001), which went on to tour more widely than any other Pacitti work and involved hundreds of performers internationally. In turn, this trajectory led directly to the emergence of SPILL Festival (with Raimund performing Sacre - The Rite of Spring as the opening event of the first SPILL Festival, at the Barbican in 2007).