The choreographer Philippe Blanchard and the dancers are sitting back stage, drinking tea and eating Ballerina cookies. When I enter the room the others quickly vanish and Philippe and I are allowed in at the cleared small stage. He does not want to show anything from the rehearsals and I don’t mind even though I would have wanted a sneak peak.

Sitting in the half dark room, at the benches of Dansens hus small stage, we talk, or rather Philippe explains wich his true inspirations are when he makes choreography; social and political content, artistic intentions as well as a lot of reading, discussing and thinking. I hear the echo of many philosophers in his words.

“I do a lot of research, one has to, you know.”

Several times he quotes J P Sartre. For example when he says Art is a different kind of reality.

"Can you explain?"
“ I think he is right. Art is not anything else than reality and when you get absorbed by it, when you don’t know the beginning or the end of it, that is really good art.”
Philippe Blanchard is convinced that when you see, read or meet something extraordinary you become a part of it, you enter the story or the play, and you don’t realize it until it ends and you have to leave.

The performance that will premiere April 20th has its antecedents in ”One’s Company, Two’s Crowd” (2006) and "Bits of Bob’s Life" (2008).

"Can you tell us about the trilogy that now ends with 'How About You?' "
“It is about how it is to be human, in general. And what is an identity, what is the self and the other, can you separate them? I don’t think you can. How do you find yourself in others?"
"Do you think people like to see themselves in others?"
“Maybe, maybe not. But I think the keyword is respect. We should respect even things we dislike, and sometimes we go across that border. But remember, we are like echoes of each other.”
"You’ve chosen a very a subjective perspective. Does it become good performance, you think?"
“I’m not sure. I guess the performance process is the core here. It is the process, the whole chain from the beginning until the end that’s important."

Our 30 minutes became 40 minutes and they felt like five. But Philippe and his dancers have to keep on practicing and the composer is only there one more hour.
One more question before I go though: "How do you understand and pick the music?"
"For me, the music is not in audio, it is physical. As soon as you hear a noise or a sound it becomes a part of your body and you start to imagine things depending on where you are, who you are with, in what state you’re in and so on. Imagination, by the way, is a part of everything you do. If you see a scene where two people embrace and the next scene is where they part, you immediately fantasise about what happened in between. That’s human. That’s one thing about being human.”

Philippe Blanchards How about you plays at Dansens hus in Stockholm 20-24 of April.