published by: Dance Zone (Tanecni Zona) PRAHA - Nina Vangeli on 30 April 2002
This is a choreographer who alludes to noetics, to intellectual speculation. He desires to know the environments around him as well as the one in his own brain. His quest relies on music and sound. The sound designer sits right on stage like a pilot at the controls. Is faith a reliable instrument for acquiring knowledge? And are hearing and touch adequate guides? Hauert is another who - hardly to our surprise - begins his quest with prime numbers. You could say he explores the dancer's thought patterns, his own thought patterns. He starts with a study of the circle. In the dim space we see a round red carpet with a microphone standing in the middle.
The piece begins with long steps around the edge of the circle, with only the subtlest of variations in rhythm, diameter, gravity, as if the dancer wished to force the circle to give up its secret by way of his persistence. Then he grabs for an anchor in the form of the microphone, a prop used often in contemporary dance. Just as drama began to sing and dance when words were not enough to portray emotion, today's dance seizes the microphone when it is not sure the audience will fully understand, when it is unclear the audience will be able to read the body and movement. - But the microphone leads only to superficial knowledge - to imitation. The dancer plays awhile with frozen poses, taken from day-to-day life - like the mime in the street who lets us know he is not a statue with a wink of his eye.
Then he returns again to his own thought structures, in which geometry meets obsessiveness. A moving light helps him to draw a series of circles and squares in the empty space; he surfs among them, first testing the shapes tentatively, then systematically, classifying them, comparing to determine which one best fits his body. Is this meeting of geometry and obsessiveness in dance entertaining? Not particularly. But Hauert's relentlessness deserves our respect - or at the very least our contemplation. We can't avoid thinking of the famed relentlessness of a genius dancer and choreographer who was ahead of his time, Vaclav Nijinsky. While falling into mental illness he drew geometric pictures like a mantra of his dance. encoding his experience, and his knowledge of dance and movement in them. Nijinsky desired mystical knowledge, and paid for it in madness. Thomas Hauert's flight is not as self-destructive, it is he who will be paid instead of paying for it.
This whole performance about the thought patterns of the dancer ends surprisingly, shifting into a kind of safe, private, legalized madness: the dancer is back at the microphone and in singing a melancholy song he slips into karaoke, into just the kind of entertainment which is the exact opposite of self-discovery - self-delusion, a personal myth, a touch of media illusion.
Nina Vangeli
