assisted solos from cows in space

source: zoo-thomashauertbe

In 1998 the Swiss dancer Thomas Hauert, having built up a wealth of experience dancing alongside Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Pierre Droulers, David Zambrano and Gonnie Heggen, decided to set up his own company, ZOO. With four fellow dancers – Mark Lorimer, Sara Ludi, Mat Voorter and Samantha van Wissen – whom he had met at the Rotterdam Dance Academy and in the Rosas dance company, he started work on creating Cows in Space. The show premiered in Kortrijk was an immediate hit, won prizes at the renowned Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, and went on to be performed in numerous venues in Belgium and abroad.

The same quintet went on to create Pop-Up Songbook (1999), Jetzt (2000) and Verosimile (2002). In 2001, Thomas Hauert presented his solo piece Do You Believe in Gravity? Do You Trust the Pilot?. For the ZOO company’s fifth production, 5 (2003), the choreographer invited each dancer to produce a personal piece. For his own, Common Senses, he directed an improvisation for ten dancers. The original members of ZOO were then joined by Martin Kilvady and Chrysa Parkinson, who went on to be involved in all the following ZOO productions – modify (2004), More or Less Sad Songs (2005), Walking Oscar (2006), puzzled (2007) and accords (2008). ZoëPoluch joined the company in 2007. Alongside shorter collaborations, ZOO has also developed long-term associations with set and lighting designers Simon Siegmann and Jan Van Gijsel, musicians and composers Bart Aga and Alejandro Petrasso, and fashion designers Thierry Rondenet and Hervé Yvrenogeau (OWN).

Movement in bodies and between bodies

ZOO’s work initially grew out of basic research into movement.Prompted by Thomas Hauert, the dancers disassociate themselves from their bodies’ usual movement forms. Every single joint offers its own specific possibilities. The combination of these individual movements can take an unlimited number of forms. In an atmosphere of playful curiosity, the dancers explore the greatest possible diversity of forms, rhythms, qualities and mutual relationships with space and external forces. ZOO based its name on a book, used by the group as study material. This choice suggests a vision of man as an animal species – a very peculiar species indeed. In other words, man not fettered by culture.

One of the main methods used by the group to explore the world of movement possibilities is improvisation. It is experienced as a tool to disconnect the body’s potential from the mind’s limitations. We are not talking about completely free improvisation, because a body that is set totally free tends to choose the easiest way out. It is, therefore, assisted improvisation, where tasks, rules and forces are imposed to break the dancers’ conditioning. Improvisation allows complex movements to be created that involve so many factors that it would be impossible to repeat them or write them down.

The aim is not to only break things down or nullify forms and codes, but rather to turn the body back to “zero” and start building something new, using human anatomy as the base. After the dancers have been temporarily extracted from their usual movement patterns, they try to apply the new parameters to their bodies. The principles are practised again and again in order to discover all possible varieties and subtleties and to create a new kind of virtuosity – because the body needs time to learn. The disorderly impression that the spectator can have initially is a consequence of his own conditioning. In reality, each one of ZOO’s proposals is a coherent movement system, an alternative to known (and recognised) systems, but applied with the utmost rigour. The stage is not life, and dance is free to invent movements without any practical use.

Going beyond the scale of the individual, ZOO also develops work on the group, on the “body” formed by the dancers together. If the exploration of the individual body leads to the expression of diversity (chaos), the group work creates cohesion, communication and connection (order). Thomas Hauert coordinates the five dancers’ bodies in Cows in Space with several tools to organise time and space. For the organisation of time he uses music composed by John Adams, Bart Aga and Alex Fostier. Acting on factors such as the mutual positions, paths and speeds of the dancers (the “cows in space”), the organisation systems create fields of tension in the space between the dancers. These fields are so complex that the spectator cannot understand them with his intellect. He only perceives an organism moved by laws of organic evolution, rather than by mechanical logics.Still, these movements are meticulously determined, because the mutual relationships that they create are so complex that it would be impossible to calculate them instantly. As ZOO continues to produce shows, the principles of spatial organisation will become increasingly flexible and reactive. In these developments, order is guaranteed by the dancers’ trust in one another, rather than by the presence of some individual authority. This is the conceptual source for the “improvised unisons” introduced in puzzled – fascinating choreographic sequences in which movement realised in unison is born spontaneously from the listening that is being done “between” the dancers, rather than by the pre-determined decision of one individual.Here, as in certain scenes in modify, the work based on directed improvisation meets intimately the one based on the coordination of the group.

An order based on confidence

The concept of trust, central to ZOO’s choreography project, also translates into the company’s structure and working process. ZOO works as a collective, where every dancer contributes his own creativity to the group. Every dancer is free, but at the same time responsible.However, the structure is not horizontal: on top of the dancers’individual reality stands a shared reality, proposed by Thomas Hauert.This common trust in the initial proposal is essential for the project, because it allows acceptance of the apparent chaos in the process. The discomfort caused by the lack of conventional authority becomes comfort from the moment we accept that we cannot have everything under control.

Buoyed by the conviction that intuition allows much more complex and unexpected results than a process based on initial verbalisation, the choreographer deliberately leaves his projects very open, aware that the encounter between his initiative and that of the dancers will unleash an unforeseeable result. The same applies to the meaning inperformances: form and content, choreographic material and symbolic consequence are developed in parallel, in an organic link, without us really being able to confirm that one preceded the other. Meaning gradually emerges from the latent preoccupations that find an outcome in the work on movement. For the choreographer, awareness of an intention does not necessarily involve the ability to verbalise it, and can even precede this verbalisation. We can “know” without being able to “explain”.

In ZOO’s shows, dance is abstract in the sense that everything is about the body and movement. Dance does not have any narrative or figurative dimension. However, the spectators do not perceive the show as something abstract. Even if the dance performance does not illustrate anything, it proposes a model that can be very meaningful.The artistic project seems like a micro-utopia, an alternative vision of man, power and society.

Inner forces and outer forces

The underlying questions found in ZOO’s purely choreographic work are also expressed through other theatrical means. Do You Believe in Gravity? Do You Trust the Pilot? questions the relationship between the self and the world. Verosimile, which introduced more theatrical elements into ZOO’s work, revolves around issues of identity, reproduction and performativity. When do you become a character? Is it when you move your arms in a particular way, differently from the others? At what point does an attitude become a characterisation? At all levels, modify develops the relationship between outer forces – influences – and inner forces –invention: “to act, modify or surrender”. Earlier, Jetzt concentrated more specifically on one of these outer forces, gravity, and on the many ways in which you can react to the state of disequilibrium.

Walking Oscar, the backbone of which consists of literary fragments by Oscar van den Boogaard, is an exceptional project in ZOO’s oeuvre in that its starting point is not based in the work on movement. However, the Dutch writer’s words, a collage of little episodes and reflections that create in-depth meaning strangely echo the questioning that has always been present in Thomas Hauert’s work:“ as you get older you notice that things and people are not the way they seem, that maybe you are not as you seem,” Oscar tells us. “… maybe nobody leads the real life, we’re all pretending; only for the child on the backseat of the car does there seem to be an intangible reality to which it does not yet belong.” And again: “… actually we had said what couldn’t be said, not by saying it, but by not saying it; no, by trying to say it but not succeeding, by pointing at it and maybe touching it a moment, but not grasping it, because when you grasp ungraspable things they’re dead.”

Likewise when Jurgen De bruyn, mainspring of the Zefiro Torna music ensemble, imagined working on medieval musical enigmas, it was entirely natural for him to think of Thomas Hauert for running the project. Symbolic figures invoked by these musical works – like the labyrinth, the compass, the key, the chessboard and the circle – actually find resonance in ZOO’s work. In the solo Do You Believe in Gravity? Do You Trust the Pilot?, for example, the starting point is a red carpet, a circle from which Thomas Hauert invades the stage, expressing the idea perhaps that man, at the risk of going round in circles, has to leave the scope of his consciousness to leap inside – towards the self – or outside – towards the world.

Walking Oscar, a performance containing all the ingredients of a musical without actually following its conventions, also attributes an important place to singing and song. Music plays an essential role in ZOO’s work, as much as a generator of movement as this group’s organising principle. From Cows in Space all the way to 12/8, the piece created for PARTS students in 2007, Thomas Hauert has mined a rich and original seam between dance and music. A symbolic example of this is Common Senses in which Thomas Hauert used an Anton Bruckner chorus as a “score” for groupimprovisation: the ten dancers learned and internalised their respective voices, finally performing improvised movement rigorously true to their musical relationships, but in total silence. But beyond this interest in music in general, song assumes particular importance in ZOO’s work. Thomas Hauert thinks that singing is very accessible for a dancer because it engages the body. The form of song also presents the interest of superimposing several strata: music, voice and words. Introduced in Pop-Up Songbook, the songs, either existing ones or ones specially written for it, can be found in several of ZOO’s shows: the solo Do You Believe in Gravity, Do You Trust the Pilot?, for which Thomas Hauert wrote the words to three ballads, Verosimile, More or Less Sad Songs and lastly Walking Oscar. In the last show, the dancers were encouraged to write the music, sing and play an instrument themselves, an experience that allowed them to enrich and refine their physical interpretation of music.

Internationally recognised work

Since 1998, ZOO’s work has appealed to wide audiences in Belgium and abroad. ZOO’s shows have been staged in more than 100 different venues in 23 countries. From New York to Seoul, from Helsinki to Maputo, the company has been invited by organisations as prestigious as the Théâtre de la Ville, the Pompidou Centre, the Festival d’Automne and IRCAM in Paris, Tanzquartier and Impulstanz in Vienna, Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona, the Danças na Cidades festival and Bélem Cultural Centre in Lisbon, the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee in Zurich, the Springdance Festival in Utrecht, the Southbank in London, the Santarcangelo festival in Italy and Podewil in Berlin, to name just a few. In Belgium, ZOO’s shows have been performed in more than 20 venues of all sizes, including at Klapstuk, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Concertgebouw in Bruges, Charleroi/Danses and, above all, the Kaaitheater, which has offered the company its unfailing support from the outset. Thomas Hauert is also regularly invited to produce pieces for outside organisations, particularly for the famous Brussels dance school, PARTS, for whose students he has created three pieces. Finally, the work of ZOO/Thomas Hauert has won several awards, including the Prix de la danse suisse for modify in 2005.
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source: vimeo

ZOO/Thomas Hauert is a Brussels based contemporary dance company. In 1998, the Swiss dancer Thomas Hauert, having built up a wealth of experience dancing alongside Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Pierre Droulers, David Zambrano and Gonnie Heggen, decided to form his own company, ZOO with four fellow dancers – Mark Lorimer, Sara Ludi, Mat Voorter and Samantha van Wissen – whom he had met at the Rotterdam Dance Academy and in the Rosas dance company. Since then, ZOO has performed for audiences in Belgium and beyond, with shows staged in more than 100 different venues in 23 countries: from New York to Seoul, from Helsinki to Maputo. Complimenting the performative aspect of the company, Hauert has developed an internationally recognized teaching method and has ongoing collaborations with schools worldwide, most notably P.A.R.T.S. Academy in Brussels.