apr 9, 2008
“Here’s to all that’s still to discover and everything we won’t ever get the chance to know.” (Thomas Hauert)
In 2008, ZOO\\Thomas Hauert is celebrating its 10th anniversary. For this occasion, ZOO reprises two shows: Cows in Space, its very first piece, and Há mais, a project that is very dear to Thomas Hauert. Há mais (“there’s more”) was created in 2002 with 5 dancers from Maputo, Mozambique, as a part of the project “Alma Txina”. In the summer 2008, the piece will be restaged in Maputo with the original dancers and then go on a concentrated tour passing by Theater Spektakel in Zurich, La Bâtie in Geneva, Kaaitheater in Brussels and Arts Alive in Johannesburg. For this re-run, Há mais will be presented with the piece Mafalala2 by the Mozambican choreographer Panaïbra Gabriel and its company Culturarte.
The piece Há mais was created in 2002 by Thomas Hauert with 5 dancers from Maputo as a part of the project “Alma Txina”, an initiative of Danças na Cidade.
“Txina” means “movement” or “dance” in Xangana, the native language of the many young dancers that spend their free hours practising dance in the streets or in one of the many abandoned spaces of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Difficulties are many, but all of these dancers have one thing in common: they have lost their soul to dance.
Five choreographers, among them Thomas Hauert, collaborated in the project “Alma Txina” and resided for nearly two months in the Mozambican capital. They started out by teaching a two-week workshop for the local dance community and went on to create, each one of them, a choreography with some of the students of each of these workshops.
Há mais, the piece created by Thomas Hauert, is the product of an encounter between the traditional dance of Mozambique and choreographic principles found in contemporary dance in the western tradition. The young dancers with whom the Swiss choreographer worked are adept at a great many local traditional dances. More often than not, these consist of the incessant repetition of a choreographic motif. Thomas Hauert and the dancers selected twelve traditional dances and then isolated the core motif in them. Each of the five dancers combined these different loops into an original sequence, a choreographic phrase transformed during the show by playing with temporalities, rhythms, qualities of movement and the relationship with the space. The dancers follow trajectories that respond to very precise spatial systems of organization, a recurrent theme in the work of Thomas Hauert and his Brussels-based company, ZOO. The show also allows plenty of scope for directed improvisation, a method which overturns what the dancer has been conditioned to do and allows the body’s potential to be unleashed from limitations imposed on it by the mind. A huge range of movements follows, executed by the Mozambican dancers with extraordinary virtuosity. In Há mais, the African dance motifs are confronted with short musical pieces by Igor Stravinsky, most of which are linked to older forms of European dance.