I am not in a room

Bees with sacred fluff - a fly whose buzzing is the last thing the poet hears before her own death - the stirring crickets performing their druidic ghost hymn in late August - and, in all the poems, a multitude of dashes that open up spaces, suggest the unsaid and activate the play of the reader's imagination: Entrances into the poetic work of Emily Dickinson.

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The I am not in a Room team 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 matter and animals, theatricalization of the smallest movement events or significant moments of life and death, as well as geographical-historical references to Amherst/USA, where Dickinson lived, the artists from Taiwan, Austria, and Germany create an associative web of gestures, sounds, energies, songs, spaces,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.

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

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Influenced by her own experiences of isolation during the lockdowns of the last few years, the study of Dickinson's work leads us to other themes that are still significant today: multicultural dimensions of her space of thought and poetry, ecological aspects from her deeply felt relationship to nature, and questions about the individual and society that culminate in the idea of becoming one with the world.