In his work, Swiss choreographer Thomas Hauert touch the common ground between dance and music. Thomas Hauert takes the notion of ‘interpretation’ as a starting point for his new group performance for six dancers, inaudible (2016). The choreographer uses existing pieces of music that he closely relates to choreographic scores, structured improvisations linked to the music. Here the dancers confront themselves with George Gershwin’s Concerto in F and Ludus de Morte Regis of contemporary composer Mauro Lanza. Always looking for new approaches to dance, Hauert reverses the principle of mickeymousing and lets the movements directly follow the music. The result is a condensed and detailed choreography, a fascinating series of movements that make tangible the musical experience. In 2005 Thomas Hauert received the Swiss Dance and Choreography Prize from the Corymbo Foundation for “modify”, and in 2013 he won a Swiss Dance Award with “From B to B”, which he created together with Àngels Margarit/Cia Mudances. followed in the same year by the dance prize from his native canton of Solothurn.
“Inaudible is where the fundamentals of dance meet the dance of Thomas Hauert: a shared space given over to the unending creativity of an intergenerational gallery of dancing figures in unlikely costumes; an organic movement of infectious dynamism, total confidence in the body’s ability to speak and the visible traces of the working process. And while this instinctive dance mingled with burlesque is also a joyous marriage with music, it nevertheless betrays a strong artistic bias towards interrogating the cohesion of a group made up of individuals.
This, in short, is a dance of society.”
ZOO/Thomas Hauert
Thomas Hauert was born in the canton of Solothurn in 1967 and completed his dance training at the Rotterdamse Dansacademie. Starting in 1991, he danced with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Compagnie Rosas, David Zambrano and Pierre Droulers, before setting up his own group, ZOO, in Brussels in 1997. Their very first work, “Cows in Space” (1998), won two awards, the Prix d’Auteur and the Prix Jan Fabre, for the most subversive choreography at the Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis in Bagnolet. Since then, Thomas Hauert and his company have created some 20 works. In 2012/13 he was the Valeska Gert guest professor of dance and performance at the Institute for Theatre Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin, and he has been academic director of the new BA degree course in contemporary dance at the Manufacture theatre university in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland, since 2014.
