ZOO - Contemporary Dance Company

apr 15, 2008

Accords opens at PACT Zollverein Essen

ZOO’s choreographic work is based on fundamental research into movement. Prompted by Thomas Hauert, the dancers set about leaving behind their bodily habits and, in a spirit of playful research, exploring the greatest possible variety of forms, rhythms, qualities and interactions with space and external forces.

One of the main methods used to open up possibilities of movement is improvisation. It is conceived of as a means of unleashing the body’s potential from limitations imposed by the mind. It is not completely free improvisation, because a body without constraints would gravitate towards its habitual paths. In contrast, directed improvisation is improvisation where tasks, rules and forces are imposed to upset these habits. Improvisation allows complex movements to be carried out involving so many factors that it would be impossible to repeat them or write them down.

It is not just about deconstructing or breaking down forms and codes, but rather about returning to the body’s most basic state and beginning there, taking anatomy as a starting point. After being temporarily divorced from their customary movement routines, ZOO\\\'s dancers endeavour to incorporate principles of direction. The principles are practised time and again, so that all possibilities and subtleties can be derived. In this way, a new virtuosity is achieved.

Beyond the level of the individual, ZOO is also developing group work on the “body” composed of all the dancers – a kind of “social body”. If exploring the individual body aims to express diversity, group work strives for cohesion, communication and connection. Thomas Hauert coordinates the dancers’ bodies through different modes of organising time and space. As ZOO has evolved, these principles have become increasingly flexible and reactive, favouring an order guaranteed by the trust each dancer has in the others, rather than by the choreographer’s authority.

Order based on trust

The idea of trust, central to ZOO’s choreographic undertaking, is also translated into the company’s structure and work process. ZOO is a company where each dancer brings his own creativity to the group. A company where each dancer is free, but also responsible. Even so, the structure is not a horizontal one. Each person’s individual realities are superimposed by a shared reality: the one proposed by Thomas Hauert. And this shared trust in the initial proposition is key to the project: it promotes acceptance of the apparent chaos of the creative process. The discomfort generated by the absence of conventional authority becomes acceptable when it is understood that not everything can be controlled, and that by letting go, a much richer complexity may be attained.

More often than not, in ZOO’s shows dance is abstract, in that it is work based mainly on the body and movement: It does not have a narrative or figurative dimension to it. However, people watching a ZOO performance do not experience it as abstract. While the performance does not illustrate anything, it does offer a model that is potentially rich in meaning. The artistic project appears like a micro-utopia: an alternative vision of man, power and society.

The relationship with music

Since Cows in Space in 1998, music has played an essential role in ZOO’s work, both as a generator of movement and an organising principle for the group. Hauert perceives music as movement in itself, a physical activity that offers a fantastic learning opportunity for the dancer, as well as a source of energy. Music can be used as an impetus for producing movement – as an external constraint allowing unexpected qualities of movement to be developed. Dynamics, harmonies, melodies, counterpoints, but also the physical and sensual experience of the vocal or instrumental interpretation, can be interpreted physically by the dancer, translated, magnified or diverted in his body. Moving from the individual level to the collective one, the various characteristics of the music also offer principles for keeping time, allowing the group to be coordinated. Lastly, for the audience, music brings a dramatic dimension, a “colour” that can support or go against the action unfolding on stage.

Over time, ZOO has explored the relationship of movement and music in varied and original ways. Sometimes dancers have used scores, sometimes specific interpretations of these scores. Sometimes sung pieces, sometimes instrumental pieces. Sometimes solos, sometimes scores for several voices or instruments. In some cases, the music used during rehearsals to create movement can also be heard on stage. In others, it has been internalised by the dancers and inscribed in their bodies, with the movement inspired by it presented on stage in silence or even to completely different music.

In Common Senses (2003), for example, Hauert used an Anton Bruckner chorus as a “score” for group improvisation. The ten dancers learned and internalised their respective voices, before improvising on stage in complete silence. The aim is not to make the piece of music visible, but rather to use the experience of it to create dance. The score allows the group to be unified, but it involves an organisational principle that allows a margin of freedom, as each dancer offers a personal interpretation of the music. Some scenes in modify (2004) develop this principle, but here each dancer follows an instrument in Handel’s Water Music that the audience is hearing simultaneously.

Hauert believes that while singing is very accessible for a dancer because it only engages the body, instrumental music is also a kind of movement. For Jetzt (2000), Thomas Hauert chose to work to music by Thelonious Monk, a jazz pianist whose very “turbulent” playing increases suspensions, accelerations, decelerations, deviations, exact opposites…

In Pop-Up Songbook (1999), Do You Believe in Gravity, Do You Trust the Pilot? (2001), Verosimile (2002), More or Less Sad Songs (2005) and Walking Oscar (2006), the dancers were also encouraged to sing, play an instrument or write the music themselves, an experience that allowed them to enrich and refine the ways in which they were able to physically interpret the music.

Accords

For his new creation, Thomas Hauert has decided to continue his work on the body and movement by concentrating more specifically on the relationship between dance and music. Starting from the principles tackled in ZOO’s earlier pieces, the dancers have set about exploring new techniques, which have gradually led them towards completely new territories.

An important stage in Thomas Hauert’s research process was a piece created for and with 20 final-year students from the PARTS dance school in Brussels in November 2007: 12/8. Like Common Senses, this project is based on using a score as a means of unifying the group. The music (that the audience does not hear) is 12 por 8 by Alejandro Sanz. The students learnt an a capella arrangement of this musically very complex pop song, characterised by a 12/8 time signature combining binary and ternary rhythms. On stage, they mentally follow their voices and, thanks to the movement, communicate between themselves to remain synchronous. For Accords, Thomas Hauert has continued developing choreographic principles based on polyrhythmic music. This is how ZOO’s dancers have created solos where several voices with different rhythms are translated in several parts of the same body, like a pianist playing several lines on a keyboard simultaneously.

Another principle developed in Accords is that of “improvised unisons”. Introduced for the first time in a scene from puzzled (2007), it creates listening-based movement “between” the dancers, as opposed to movement decided on in advance by a single individual. Although realised in unison, which might make people assume that it has been written, the movement in it is improvised within predefined rules. The status of “leader” constantly shifts from one dancer to the next. The movements, initiatives, impulses of each one are instantly picked up and transformed by the others. This process asks the dancers to be permanently listening and giving their complete concentration, and at any given moment to be responsible as well. No one controls the movement, but at the same time everyone is involved in creating it.

If the work on polyrhythmic movement juxtaposes several melodies from the same arrangement within a group or body, improvised unisons reveal a continuous line of movement. However, with the initiative shifting constantly between the dancers, who each hear something distinctive and gain different direction from it, over time this line can end up reflecting the different motifs in the music. The dancers are also free to break away from the group temporarily. The main line is then subdivided into several lines that are still connected to each other by translating the same music. The audience members see the music travel through the group, their eye movements linking the physical action with the events that can be heard in the music. A parallel could be drawn between the wind’s movement being seen in the swaying of thousands of ears of corn, or even LED signs showing a moving text when there are actually only flashing dots.

Dance and music are parts of a classic combination, perhaps even the very first one. Anyone watching Accords might think that they are seeing a choreography written to music, because ZOO’s dancers attempt to come as close as possible to the precision found therein. Yet the process of creating movement turns out to be radically different here. It involves a “democratic” process, based on individual freedom and permanent attention being paid to others: a process aimed at obtaining a choreographic complexity beyond that of a written piece. Thomas Hauert chooses to rely on the intuitive intelligence of the body and the group.

Denis Laurent