To mark the 10th anniversary of its creation, Thomas Hauert’s ZOO dance company restages its very first piece: Cows in Space. This is an exceptional opportunity to see (again) a show that was an award-winner at the renowned Rencontres chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis in 1999 and took this Brussels dance company all the way to Japan. The national and international reprise of Cows in Space will be launched in Brussels’ Kaaitheater on 25 and 26 January – the start of a year of celebrations for ZOO.

Having built up a wealth of experience dancing alongside Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Pierre Droulers and David Zambrano, Thomas Hauert decided to form his own company, naming it ZOO. Along with four fellow dancers– Mark Lorimer, Sara Ludi, Mat Voorter and Samantha van Wissen - he started work on creating Cows in Space, which was premiered in Kortrijk on 28 January 1998. They found they had struck gold with their first work, winning the Prix d’auteur and the Jan Fabre prize for the most subversive work at the Rencontres chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis. The show went on to be performed in several venues in Belgium and abroad, including the Kaaitheater, the Botanique, Charleroi/Danses, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Yokohama Culture Foundation in Japan. The new company was also a great hit with critics for showing “that abstract dance can be a celebration and convey incredible emotions”.

Between writing and improvisation, order and disorder, Cows in Space was already articulating the preoccupations that are at the heart of ZOO’s later work: the coordination of a group of moving bodies – perceived as a single living organism – but also the exploration of infinite possibilities of movement for a human body freed from its cultural and aesthetic customs. Ten years and a dozen productions later, restaging this founding creation seems a particularly interesting thing to do. Especially as 4 of the 5 dancers who created Cows in Space are remarkably still part of ZOO in 2008, a company whose work depends on the extraordinary closeness that unites its members.