Pina loved water.

The relationship with water was always a question.

Especially for Vollmond.

It was the year of Hurricane Katrina, the great storm in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2006.

This event has greatly affected the world.

When something happened, like a natural disaster, Pina wanted it to enter her work, her research. 

Pina always tried to have it in her work involvement with what was important in the world: the wars in the Middle East, the tsunami ...

Whether it was suffering or joy, she tried to have current events enter her work, in a subtle way. 

While the hurricane was rocking the whole world, she came to the studio and asked us the question: "Katrina , what do you mean?".

Suffering, disaster, necessity, emergency, urgency.

This was in Pina's shows.

Urgency.

Urgency in movements, urgency in the relationship with oneself, with our desires, urgency of love.

All this urgency is within her shows.

But in Vollmond particularly.

Pina collected all our ideas about water, about Katrina, about this moment of emergency in the United States.

I was born in North Carolina in the United States, but I spent my childhood in New Orleans for 11 years.

When Hurricane Katrina hit I had already lived in Amsterdam and had worked with Pina for many years, but in my childhood I experienced a hurricane.

I was 6, it was Hurricane Betsy, it was an experience I have a terrible memory of.

I remember the feeling of saying: "Will it end?"

We were in a small corridor, my mother, my little brother and me, my father was not there because he was in another city for work that weekend.

What you would never want to happen to you, a tsunami, an earthquake, a hurricane and instead was happening in my life. 

So when she asked this question about Katrina, I started doing all the things I remembered: my mom filling the bathtub with water, we who take food in jars and fill the kitchen cupboard, we who we get ready to wait for this terrible nightmare that was to come.

An infinite rain.

Another question of her was: to write water with the body, the different words Water , Wasser, and then also all the possible variations to express water, a small drop of water falling for example.

In my solo there is a moment when there is only a tear falling and I do the movement and keep dancing.

A small element like this was the answer to a physical, choreographic question, but it is too strong a word "choreographic".

It is the poetry of space and of the body, it is the "human language".

How can I allow a body to express itself without words, with its sensitivity, its hands, its head, its feet, its person, its soul and all the emotions, how is it possible to speak and give a language to the whole humanity?

And Pina did this in all of her magnificent shows.