Now he has the whole world under a spell, Wim Vandekeybus finally decides to have a world première of his dance company Ultima Vez in Belgium once again. "Jan Goossen, artistic director of the Bottelarij theatre once was my assistant" he says, "we understand one another, everything is going smoothly." You should not take that too literally: 'Blush' writhes and stretches and once again challenges the dancer's instincts until they fall down. Only this time they will do so while David Eugene Edwards, leader of Sixteen Horsepower, is singing his heart out.

DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS: "I know Wim by way of Tom Barman."

WIM VANDEKEYBUS: "dEUS has opened for Sixteen Horsepower, and the other way round. When I told Tom I was looking for a deep and driven voice, someone who adds colour, he immediately thought of Edwards. I didn't know him, but his solo-CD Woven Hand had just been released, and I could attend a concert shortly. That made me so enthusiastic that when the show was I stepped up to him straightaway. I saw him thinking Who is that?!"

EDWARDS [laughs]: "Yes, he looked rather wild, but after that we did hit it off. He send me videos, and then I went to Brussels and for ten days I watched every rehearsal with my wife and my daughter - for she dances too. And what we saw was really marvellous.
"I love the way Wim works. I love it when people go far. Those rehearsals where so intense. The dancers go home at night full of bruises, sometimes they almost hobble home. Or to the hospital, haha. I love people who go to the limit like that. He does what he does, not stopping to think about what is proper or normal, or what people might think of him. Nothing is contrived. He is and does what he feels, raw emotion. That is difficult. If you surrender yourself like that, you soon become somewhat silly. "

HUMO: You're aware of that too?

EDWARDS: "Yes, In what I do, I can easily become ridiculous too. Perhaps I am. I don't know."

HUMO: At the Botanique earlier this year when singing 'Down the Forest' [sic] you dared to chant the line 'Jesus above Everything' with your guitar above your head.

EDWARDS [laughs]: "Yes, I do that. For me it is the only way to go about things: without fearing that you look foolish, or nuts, or whatever."

VANDEKEYBUS: "David's voice screams, but it goes so deep that your hair stands on end. He is a very spiritual man, very much inspired by the New Testament. He has a certain heavy quality. He does play medieval instruments, but in a rock way. He has nothing to do with fashion; he has something very pure. That tallies with the piece."

HUMO: Why?

VANDEKEYBUS: "Blush, you blush when you show an aspect of yourself that you really don't want to show. It is about something welling up inside you; a chemical reaction within you, you get a hot flush and phew! there it is. I feel that when David is singing: there's an upsurge and then he gets into a trance."
"In dancing I don't want to see someone who is just displaying what he can do well. That doesn't grip me. Only when you do exactly the opposite, let go of your prowess and go against it, only then it becomes interesting. You're skating over thin ice and lose power and your certainties. That is true for the audience too. I don't want the people in the auditorium thinking: 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!' the whole time. No, I want them to hate what they see, and think: No! Wrong! And only on a given moment, after they have had to fight for it within themselves: Yyyesss!"

"I still like to demolish everything and not be certain of anything, in my private life too. Of course you have to be able to be in command of that a little - I don't advise unstable people to take this far. But actually, I am quite an annihilator. Again and again I want to build up something new and surprise myself. I don't believe at all - because I happen to have a certain status - that I will again make a good production anyhow and that I will just tell my dancers what they have to do. I have eight new dancers, and they have to help me too, give me new things. That is what I do ask of them. And I myself will dance again too, even though, because of several accidents on stage, I don't have any ligaments in one knee or a meniscus. All new risks, but that's why 'Blush' will be good, you hear. [laughs]."

HUMO: You like to reduce everything to the bone. You once did an all-male performance, after that one with only women.

VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes, the absence of women in the all-men production did provide some unforgettable moments. I was somewhat afraid that the result would be too macho men-only, but the opposite happened: they became less macho and held conversations like:'Shall I lift you up now, or will you lift me up?' [laughs] Very tender really."
"No, the all-female show actually was much tougher. It was strange that in everything the women said or did men played a part under the skin - that's why, at a certain moment, they drew a silhouette of a man with soil."
"With the men, women immediately didn't play a part anymore. Perhaps we're more boyish, we sometimes act silly, and yes we can more easily be absorbed completely in something. Not for nothing the male-production was called 'In Spite of Wishing and Wanting'."

HUMO: Because in that too the male instinct gets the better of their will.

EDWARDS: "I myself constantly have the feeling that I am again doing something wrong. I do try to do everything correctly, but some of my inclinations are stronger than my will."
"You know my father left all of a sudden one day. He had become a biker, rode about his bike, got addicted to alcohol and drugs. He only returned back home when he had leukaemia. I have tapes on which he says that he is thankful to God for that disease, because it brought him back to his faith."

VANDEKEYBUS: "When I read, I often end up with the 'Metamorphoses' by Ovid because they all deal with the fragility of men, the human aspect. About the war raging inside us."

EDWARDS: " 'Blush' is also roughly based on 'Orpheus and Eurydice', about the lyre player who goes looking for his dead wife in the nether world. That myth is about the longing for something of which you know it isn't good. I also sing about that internal struggle, about human weakness, about temptation, about Good and Evil."
"Every artist gets jammed because he is inclined to zero in on himself more than is good for his housemates. And here on Pukkelpop I will probably drink wine again and perhaps too much, and then I become an arse-hole. Letting yourself go, nearly always, is at the expense of other people."

VANDENKEYBUS: "Really we are talking about the same, we only give it a different name. Within you Good fights Evil."

EDWARDS: "And within you, your instinct fights your intellect, or your conscious your unconsciousness."

VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes. That is well put. I also see evil as something poetic, I think. Like I said: I do like destruction."

EDWARDS: "Mmm. I'm no different. That is in our nature. Ever since the beginning of time, so to speak. We could live in complete freedom, and we did not choose Good but Evil, out of egoism and self-interest. We want to be our own master, don't we? But unfortunately... And now we can't go back anymore."

VANDEKEYBUS: "I don't think in religious terms that much, but I do understand that faith helps to give meaning to things."

HUMO: David Eugene, as a child you always used to go to church with your grandfather.

EDWARDS: "Yes, after my parents' divorce I was raised by him. I still see him often. I also like to be at home with my wife and children. I think family is important. To keep yourself humble. To have a better grasp of where you're coming from and what you are."

HUMO: Wim Vandekeybus, your trust is rather more based on your subconscious and your instinct, on nature. You know nature, because your father was a veterinary surgeon.

VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes. There is something calm about an animal, it does not want to explain things or make up stories. An animal is what it is. It kills when it is hungry. When I look around me I see that everybody in the city is leading a more and more schizophrenic life: faster and faster, more ups and downs, stressed out every weekend because they have to go away and have to feel 'Yeah!', have to feel good. When I'm at home and I see farmers calmly going about their own way that feels very earthed. We will be lying covered in earth soon, won't we? We have only borrowed this life here shortly."

EDWARDS: "I don't think that our intelligence - or that what we call our intelligence - and so-called progress have brought us closer to the core. Just look at all the natural disasters, the weather... I think God uses all the progress we have made - everything we have tried to win our way - to show us we have no power. That we are not masters."

VANDEKYBUS: "Nothing is certain, is it? And what makes sense to some, makes no sense to others. Only the uncertainty and the fear to loose things is primary for everybody. That is in everybody's nature. That shackles him to his emotions, as soon as there are things he cannot say goodbye to. There always is a moment when you start to become attached."

EDWARDS: "Man was not made to be alone. It says so in the Bible [laughs]."

HUMO: In 'Blush' men and women are dancing together again.

VANDEKEYBUS: "Yes, you also blush when a crush starts - from the first coup de foudre (stroke of lightning) until the disillusionment and everything in between. Hope, pain, the discovery that you are somebody else with each different woman, as if you lead a double-life. Doubt - Orpheus looks over his shoulder, because he wrongly doubts of love. Shame... "

HUMO: How often does a rock-musician fight temptation?