Verosimile
Abstract
Verosimile (2002) used dance and songs to explore such themes as group
vs individual, conformity vs. identity, and appearing vs being.
Verosimile
Presentation
The
young Swiss-born choreographer, Thomas Hauert, performed with Anne
Teresa De Keersmaeker between 1991 and 1995. This great Flemish
choreographer is an icon for the generation of dancers and
choreographers that put Belgium at the forefront of dance over the past
twenty years. We could also name others such as Jan Fabre, Alain
Platel, Wim Vandekeybus, who have been drawing along a bunch of young
creative choreographers. Thomas Hauert is one of them.
He made a splash in 2001 with the solo Do You Believe in Gravity? Do You Trust the Pilot?
in which he initiated a new type of investigation combining short texts
and songs with his movement vocabulary. In Verosimile he adopts a
similar approach in order to explore the numerous possible ways in
which dance, theatre and songs can interact, complementing and
modifying each other. "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things,
is the true aim of art," said Oscar Wilde*. On the subject of
transformation, of changing identities, Thomas Hauert and the members
of ZOO most definitely invite us to such an experience in Verosimile,
constructed between what's real and what's false, between the body's
actual appearance and its simulacrum on stage.
Thomas
Hauert's company ZOO functions as a collective. The four dancers
present on stage with him, his long-time companions, closely
collaborated in the creation of Verosimile. They co-wrote the lyrics
and music of the songs they perform with the help of a hand-held
microphone, and they developed part of the choreographic material based
on improvisations. This improvised aspect and the unexpected elements
it entails coexist with an extremely strong written structure. The
determinate and the indeterminate are superimposed to bring tension and
vitality to the dance. The dancers move according to geometric
patterns, the compositions unfold in the shape of arches, lines and
circles; an accident is never far away. The dance gradually takes hold.
The dancers take their time to walk around a stage covered in pastel
coloured stripes and lit by circular beams lending it a contradictory
aspect as an ornate as well as bare music hall.
Verosimile
is a humorous and mocking account of people gathered in groups by way
of the funny attitudes adopted by their bodies. The audience sees a
number of variations on togetherness and separateness. The dancers, at
first free and alone, gather to circle slowly and then to walk in step
in single file to an almost martial beat (fortunately all warlike
implications are undermined by the translucent night-dresses worn as
uniforms). The unison ends in a cacophony of limbs knocking together.
Other moments offer a fleeting vision of identity, doubling and
multiplicity. The shapeless group, gathered in contact improvisation,
resembles a Hindu deity with many and ever-changing limbs and faces.
One of the dancers assumes consecutively, and only for a few beats, the
guise of a Renaissance angel with a straw wig or of a dubious Iggy Pop.
The mechanics of man becoming or originating in an animal is
explored by strange birds and all of a sudden one remembers but of
course! that this company's name is ZOO. One of Hauert's first pieces
was called Cows in Space. It was already about gravity and airiness and
the combination of opposites. That is true singleness of mind mind
you keep on watching this choreographer!
Guillaume Schmitt
Le Manège de Reims, December 2002
* quoted by Marianne Van Kerkhoven in an article about Thomas Hauert
Marianne Van Kerkhoven about the work of Thomas Hauert
(Kaaitheater, program Jan-Feb 2002)
"In order to love you, I accept the risk of failure"
Thomas Hauert
1
In Belgium, dance is in every respect
a young art form. The Flanders Ballet, our first classical company, was
only established in 1969. From 1980, young dancers such as Anne Teresa
De Keersmaeker started to develop their own modern dance idiom. A lot
of hard work has been done since then. Brussels has for some years now
been marked down on the map of the world as a city of dance. In the
wake of these choreographic developments (De Keersmaeker, Platel,
Fabre, Vandekeybus, etc.), many young choreographers came and settled
in Flanders, and especially in Brussels. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's
founding of the P.A.R.T.S. dance school in 1995 signified additional
allure for Brussels as a city of dance. A large number of young
choreographers live, work and create here.
2
One
of them is Thomas Hauert. He was born in a small village in
Switzerland. As a small boy he danced in the hall of his home. When he
was five or six he went to a performance of Holiday on Ice with his
parents. It was at the moment that he decided somewhere in his mind, to
become a dancer. After training as a teacher in Switzerland, he went to
the Rotterdam Academy of Dance and then found himself in Anne Teresa De
Keersmaeker's company in Brussels. While there, he participated in the
creation of such pieces as Erts, Mozart Concert Arias and Kinok. But it
was clear there and then that he wanted to be a creative artist
himself-among other things he did a choreographic 'exercise' set to
Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Camera. Another important event was his
meeting with the choreographer and improviser David Zambrano. After a
solo in 1997, in 1998 he created the piece Cows in Space with five
dancers, for which he immediately won several prizes at the major
gathering of young choreographers at Bagnolet in France. Since then he
has done several solo projects and continued to work on his following
group choreographic pieces (including Pop-Up Songbook and Jetzt) with
the same dancers: Sara Ludi, Samantha Van Wissen, Mark Lorimer, Mat
Voorter and Hauert himself:
An
exceptionally stable young group that is extremely interested in the
research work that it is able to carry out while putting the
choreography together. Thomas is actually 'the choreographer of the
group', but always emphasises that the work is done as a collective and
that his dancers are 'co-creators' of the performances. The company's
name is ZOO, which, significantly, we can translate as meaning 'looking
at animals', and especially at the most bizarre variety, 'the human'.
"Wednesday.
I was walking along an eucalyptus-lined avenue when a cow sauntered out
from behind a tree. I stopped and we looked each other in the eye. Her
cowness shocked my humanness to such a degree-the moment our eyes met
was so intense-I stopped dead in my tracks and lost my bearings as a
man, that is, as a member of the human species" (Witold Gombrowicz)
3
There
are two approaches that invariably appear in Thomas Hauert's work: on
the one hand he works with his dancers on moments of improvisation and
sequences that are in no sense fixed in advance, and on the other, his
starting point often consists of well-defined geometric or spatial
patterns that seriously determine the choreography. It is precisely
this duality of 'fixed' and 'non-fixed' that gives his choreography its
vitality. Hauert has a tremendous confidence in the intelligence and
spontaneous reactions of the body: we could never have devised
beforehand the movement that we improvise, and what we carry out in
accordance with chosen patterns acquires an added physical value which
we could not in theory have imagined. Dancing as a practice, with the
body in action.
4
Thomas
Hauert does not 'just' create; there is thought and a philosophy behind
his steps and movements. In Cows in Space he examined, among other
things, the space 'between' the dancers and wanted to give the audience
the impression that they were in the moving train observing a landscape
with cows as if it were that that was moving: an attempt to manipulate
the audience's perception. In Pop-Up Songbook, it was not only the
body, but also the voice that was subjected to examination, and what's
more, Hauert and his dancers were here already involved in intensive
experimentation on balance and gravity: for example, in a long sequence
in this piece the performers try out the most varied movements,
standing on one leg, and so on. In Jetzt, the study of weightlessness
was continued: every possible floating state between falling and
landing was tried out: what happens to the body between the beginning
and the end of a fall? The following solo that Hauert created was
called Do you believe in gravity? Do you trust the pilot?
"Life
could never have come into being in a stable situation. In such as
state the growing complexity of its forms could never have appeared. It
is, on the contrary, in a constant state of instability, like that of a
man who, pushed in the back, chases after his own centre of gravity in
order not to fall, that life became possible" (Henri Laborit, biologist)
5
Thomas
Hauert is currently making a new group choreographic work that builds
on the experiences gained in his solo 'about gravity'. The voice will
be heard once again in this group project:"we want to write our own
songs", but the essential starting point is the one great contradiction
that dominates theatre, that between the Real and the Simulated,
between true and not true. The beauty of a work of art is in part the
enjoyment of the lie we see in it. Not maintaining any more pretence
about reality. "The lie, the telling of fine, untrue things is the
actual purpose of art", so wrote Oscar Wilde.
This
time, Hauert wants to work with theatrical elements and characters.
When do you become a character? When you move your arms in a certain
way, different from the others? At what stage can your posture be said
to reflect a character? How do you change yourself visibly, for the
audience-by means of particular movements? When you speak lines, do you
automatically come closer to being a character? Surely movement has its
rights too?
So many questions, but no answers. The performance will give a provisionally answer.
"What
is positive, the weight or the lightness? Parmenides answered that the
light is positive, the heavy negative. Was he right? That is the
question. One thing is certain. The antithesis of heavy and light is
the most mysterious and ambiguous of all antitheses" (Milan Kundera)
SONGS
Sam's song
I haven't made a choice
To give truth a chance
Don't remember the motive
Will my soul come back to me?
Questioning the meaning of each word
Makes me silent
Once spoken, leaving my mouth,
Never to return
Easy life
No memories left
Who, where and when am I
Am I wearing red?
Feelings too, left me
A while ago
Because I doubted them
Didn't give them the protection
They needed to survive
Easy life
No memories left
Living without emotions
Only nonentity ahead
To look truth in the eyes
Trace the lines of its face
Soul come back
Resensetise oblivious days
Did I forget, or even once know
How it would be
To loose everything
I'd cherished inside
Soul, please come back to me
Thomas' song
What would happen
If I told you
What I think about you?
Would it scare you?
Would it hurt you?
Or would it make you trust me more?
What would happen
If I told you
What I think about you?
Would it charm you?
Would it excite you?
Or would it distance you from me?
I guess,
If I did,
I'd have to realise
That what I thought
Is now wrong,
Because I was not
Taking into account
You knowing
My thoughts
And the you
I had thoughts about
Will have gone
It might have been true
Before I said it,
But now that you know,
It is not anymore
Mark' s song
In the past he had no future, just a secret to be buried in his brain
Confirmation, if invisible, of consequences no-one could explain
Struggling to comprehend, the people spinning clumsily round hope and fear
But with some naïve tenacity, the boy discerned just what and not to hear, for years
The monumental meaning of microscopic information -
A miniature world history, a few years' interpretation
Religious retribution, science-led investigation
Sympathy
policy
stigma
damnation
Now it's now and truth has changed, opinions fade like ghosts of those they represent
But the boy, now 'safe' in chemistry, remembers views he tries not to resent
Knowing, as we will, that what we think today will turn out false why are we sure?
Seeming certainties feel comfortable but facts are rhetoric and nothing more
to explore
The monumental meaning of microscopic information -
A miniature world history, 20 years' interpretation
Advancing medication, geographic implication,
Charity
profit
politics
nation
The new embryonic ideal future scene the boy now secretly invents -
An effective, universal cure that's quick and simple costing pence
Expectations of a time - do they inform events or simply have no weight?
Does the butterfly effect inspire in thought, or what exactly can dictate? Is it fate?
The monumental meaning of microscopic information
A miniature world history, further years' interpretation
Enlightened frustration, global celebration,
Memory
apathy
insight
explanation
Mat's song
Streaming breath
Every step like a wonder
Unfolding as a flower in our heart
Truth keeps on moving
Enter the world of reality
If we want to see a wonder, it's right here
A ritual of daily behaviour
Playing with our tail
Surprise can be anywhere
Dance the day
A chain of infinite reality
Who was here yesterday, last year, thousand years ago, next year, over thousand years
A chain of infinite reality
Wherever you are, have been and will be
A chain of infinite reality
There won't be fruits
If you not take care of roots
Failure and success
Is not a one-man-show
Enter the world of reality
If we want to see a wonder, it can be everywhere
Non-violent meeting with reality
Streaming breath
Be be, being conscious
A matter of life and death
A chain of infinite reality
A chain of infinite reality
A chain of infinite reality
A chain of infinite reality
Sara's song
I need my daily amount of lies
To sit confidently in the dream
We all agreed on
Say, do you mind if you're lied to?
I'm here with a soft yarn lie
Amorously knitted around my neck
Just like you, soon
Say, do you mind if you're lied to?
Now a tangled little truth fights its way
Through the jam of my mind
Let me take care of it and with time
It will adopt and grow with us.
You'll love it!
I'm a stranger to you
But you know that I know that we know
We're just pretending to describe
What looks like nothing we know
