Thomas Hauert's sharp movements

published by: Rosita Boiseau, Le Monde on 01 December 2006

The choreographer Thomas Hauert’s barefaced, undisturbed eccentricity reaches a new high in his recent creation for six dancers and a pianist Walking Oscar, presented at the Théâtre de la Ville until the 2nd December. The stage is dominated by heavy, black curtains that slide over their rod. Every movement of the cloth unveils a dark cavern from which a luminous apparition arises. The caverns are like velvet boxes in which evanescent presentations seem to interchange sibylline messages between two sumptuously depressive pop songs.
    With this labyrinth Thomas Hauert shows once again his unlimited originality. Since he created his company ZOO in 1997, this Brussels-based choreographer of Swiss origin has definitely paved his own path.
    Dancing and singing, without ever losing track of the movement which he accentuates in the extreme, he speaks a complex, magic language between the underlying concept and formal virtuosity. Everything is beautifully solid – like here again in Walking Oscar. Oscar, the obscure double of the Dutch writer Oscar van den Boogaard, is presented as a tormented mind. His text in off is also projected onto a transparent screen. Prone on a mattress in the dark or sparkling in luminous white, he finds himself manipulated. This spectre is determined by the lost innocence, the forefathers’ heritage and the impotence of being oneself.
    In Walking Oscar the spectator can almost touch the gravity of the mental life of a man whose enigma is endlessly renewed. The music, voices and dance are intensely intertwined. While the text is sometimes too present, this totally new kind of musical comedy reflects the images, generated by the words in the breakers, as implacable as the one of the unconscious.