Walking Oscar

2006

After producing several works involving dance and song (Pop-Up Songbook, Do You Believe in Gravity? Do You Trust the Pilot?, Verosimile, More or Less Sad Songs), Thomas Hauert and his company ZOO have created a show that combines movement, words and music around the writings of Oscar van den Bogaard. Walking Oscar is a type of “musical” that does not respect the conventions of the genre.

Oscar van den Bogaard’s writing is non-linear, a collage of small episodes and thoughts that makes sense on a deeper level. Like our brain no doubt, the main routes of his texts intersect secondary paths or take unexpected short-cuts to result in an entirely personal cohesion. The author provided a collection of short passages that form a quasi-impressionistic (self-) portrait.

Thomas Hauert and the dancers from ZOO have undertaken to put these fragments into order, into perspective(s) and in relation to each other to create a new constellation from the associations they create within the group. Read by the Scottish actor Stuart McQuarrie, the (re)structured text run through the show in the form of a sound-track. The movements that are added to the words, as well as the songs which intersect them – written by the dancers themselves in collaboration with Alejandro Petrasso and Bart Aga – always answer them in one way or another. Sometimes they interpret or illustrate them, sometimes they question or inflect them and sometimes they just use their rhythm.

Walking Oscar starts the game of mental associations on stage, inviting the audience to continue it in the theatre. A montage of episodes emerging out of the darkness of the set like as many points of view on innocence and responsibility, identity and adaptation, will and manipulation, the real and the imaginary. A montage where it is a question too of the sense of frustration linked to the experience we are all having with our own limits, our “inadequacies”: a reality that you cannot look directly at for too long without being blinded by it.

Listening to a voice speaking words and understanding the voice or not (or listening to music, a song, or watching people perform etc.) is one part of the experience, then there’s a mental side to it: everything the experience makes you think of. If you have two or more experiences simultaneously the associations get mixed up and that’s understanding too.

The observation of this phenomenon and letting yourself go along with it gives you many insights and can be very exciting. You’re not simply taking in what’s happening but memories are popping up in your consciousness and get combined with new thoughts, constantly changing your angle towards what you experience (now there’s movement in your mind and all improvised). Your thoughts will influence how you will perceive and interpret the next few words, images, sounds and the associations you will make by means of them. Who said watching is interpreting? Don’t ask how you are able to do all at once.

All experiences can ring bells in our memory, I guess that’s what makes them what they are. We’re having a lot of them all the time and the bells certainly don’t only sound like language. Mixing up associations must make a hell of a noise.

I don’t think Oscar’s texts need any mixing up (although juggling with them is fascinating). I had the privilege to discover them without even a voice giving clues to whom this biography belongs (well the radio might have been on while reading). Oscar gave us free reign and we are taking his alter ego for a walk. We show him, sing him, dress him up, confirm him, contradict him, interpret him, impersonate him, comment on him, compare him, misunderstand him, obscure him and are his sister. You will see and look, listen and hear, and take him and us for a walk through your head and we get a tour through the castle and a lecture about the newest developments in philosophy by the philosopher herself or some of us get badly attacked by the hostile castle dog or is it the philosopher’s? That’s just how we’re made.

Thomas Hauert

Concept & direction Thomas Hauert
Choreography, dance, singing, song texts & composition Thomas Hauert, Martin Kilvady, Sara Ludi, Chrysa Parkinson, Samantha van Wissen, Mat Voorter.
Text Oscar van den Boogaard
Voice over Stuart McQuarrie
Music composition & piano Alejandro Petrasso
Music composition Bart Aga
Soundtrack Aliocha Van der Avoort
Sound technician Peter Van Hoesen
Lighting & stage design Jan Van Gijsel
Costumes OWN
Production ZOO/Thomas Hauert
Coproduction Kaaitheater, Brussels (BE) / KunstenfestivaldesArts, Brussels (BE) / Théâtre de la Ville, Paris (FR) / Festival d’Automne à Paris (FR)/ Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna (AT) / Charleroi Danses (BE) / Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona (ES)

7 April 2007
Charleroi Danses Charleroi (BE)
6 April 2007
Charleroi Danses Charleroi (BE)
17 March 2007
Tanzquartier Wien Vienna (AT)
16 March 2007
Tanzquartier Wien Vienna (AT)
15 March 2007
Tanzquartier Wien Vienna (AT)
18 February 2007
Mercat de les Flors Barcelona (ES)
17 February 2007
Mercat de les Flors Barcelona (ES)
16 February 2007
Mercat de les Flors Barcelona (ES)
15 February 2007
Mercat de les Flors Barcelona (ES)
24 January 2007
Teatro Camàµes Lisbon (PT)
11 January 2007
CC Roeselare - De Spil Roeselare (BE)
2 December 2006
1 December 2006
30 November 2006
29 November 2006
28 November 2006
11 November 2006
10 November 2006
9 November 2006
5 November 2006
ADC Genève Genève (CH)
4 November 2006
ADC Genève Genève (CH)
3 November 2006
ADC Genève Genève (CH)
2 November 2006
ADC Genève Genève (CH)
1 November 2006
ADC Genève Genève (CH)
27 October 2006
3 June 2006
PACT Zollverein Essen (DE)
2 June 2006
PACT Zollverein Essen (DE)
28 May 2006
Bratislava in Movement Bratislava (SK)
13 May 2006
Nottdance Nottingham (GB)
10 May 2006
9 May 2006
7 May 2006
6 May 2006

Walking Oscar