Jantine Jongbloed, Oerol Dagkrant (The daily blog of Oerol festival) June 11:  

An attempt to understand my emotion at the Motus Mori Museum

I watch five half-naked people who have tied together thousands of individual movements in a choreography, which they now perform for me in grandiose slow tempo and with the utmost precision. I sit in a pew for an hour and watch. After ten minutes, I start crying. It goes the way something like this starts, with moist eyes. It ends with me wiping my cheeks after half an hour of thick round tears trailed down over them. Tears so thick and round you could call them piglets, or hailstones, individual, smooth-cut bubbles that the skin of my cheeks can identify piece by piece.

Maybe the emotion comes from the delay in the dancers’ movement, which amplifies everything, makes it so explicit – that the difference between people ‘lies in details’. Maybe it is because of the dancers’ dedication, their concentration, their surrender. Like watching animals in a deer park. Perhaps by the clear distinction between young and old human movements, the memory of my stiff knees the day before yesterday. Perhaps by the beauty of all trying. Maybe the fragility of the bodies I look at has something to do with it, so bare and touchable and vulnerable. Every spot and wrinkle and breath visible in the chest, the back, the up and down of a belly roll. The body so functional and alive.

It may be because the people diagonally opposite me are also crying, even louder than myself, even redder and more bloodshot. Or the amazement about this idea of preserving not just photos and letters but people’s movements before they leave us? The confrontation with this one body we must live with, or better be allowed to? Taking care of it and neglecting it? This resting point in the busy Oerol, the weariness, the fulfilment, the privilege. Just watching and not having to do anything, this work of art, this place, this here.

It could be.

As I leave the room, an hour later, quiet and subdued, I flick through the guest book at the exit. Many fellow visitors have been touched. Many write that.

Watching attentively, being watched carefully, seeing the other. I guess that’s where the emotion comes from.

Kester Freriks, Theaterkrant also wrote about Motus Mori MUSEUM 

“There is yet another meaningful performance at Oerol, choreographer Katja Heitmann’s Motus Mori MUSEUM. Everyone wants to go there; in Oerol’s Dagkrant, Jantine Jongbloed writes that she was ‘moved to tears’, as were numerous visitors. This hushed dance performance, most reminiscent of a slow-moving sculpture, is about forgotten movements that are nevertheless etched in everyone’s physical memory. The performance is indeed of great intensity and stillness, accompanied by music full of rhythmic beauty. Heitmann also seeks meaningfulness, and she does so by overcoming transiency, through performance art. Magnificent. In fact, emotion emerged in the church space.”