Being an improviser, I regularly find myself falling into “compare and despair.” They are all getting grants, they are all making pieces, they are all writing things down and publishing, they are getting noticed. I ask myself why is this? Why is my work not noticed, unnoticeable. It’s because I make process. I do not make reproducible products. I expose process. I elaborate vulnerability and put that on stage. Never to be seen again. Only live once. An experience that enters the audience and passes through — a memory, a movement, a moment of awe, then it’s gone. My products are like dust.
To sell, to market, to bring attention to a something that is not there. Some thing that can be traced or if followed on a path comes to an empty point, a place of nothing but a hint of what could be, arriving at the end of a string that has passed through a labyrinth yet leads nowhere but into nothingness, into potential, into the possibility, into process, into the unfolding of each moment as it arises — this is difficult to sell. My products are like dust.
Yes, I have video documentation. Yes, I have audio recordings. Yes, I have photographs. All them prove that I exist, or have existed. All them prove that I have done something, that I have created, that I know how to manifest a performance, that I have the skills to produce. But none of them have ever been re-produced. None of them have been carried in the mind from one theater to the next. They are processes. They are craftings in space and time, live poetry on the blank canvas of emptiness. My products are like dust.
So when a theater or dance space says yes, they are not getting a guarantee. They are not acquiring a definite result that will move the audience in a particular direction. They are getting a possibility, they are suggesting a place for an event, that moves back and forth and sideways and all the time up and down. They are saying yes to wonder, yes to the intersection of memory and physical experience, yes to the crafting of body and voice, yes to the flick of finger, the stomp of a foot, the cry to a god that is not there or does not answer. They are saying yes to the world we all sit in, one of fear and judgment and love, a world of spectacle and delicacy, a place where we all sense the vibrations between us, we all tense and shudder with the blasts of cold, where we all dream of release and all sigh when it comes, a place of openness and desire, of wishes and wants, a place that exists for a moment, and then it is gone. My products are like dust.
© 2026 Sten Rudstrom