Walking Oscar

After Verosimile (2002), Thomas Hauert wanted to go further exploring the relationship between singing and the body even further. Walking Oscar is a continuation of More or Less Sad Songs (2005). It involves movement, text, music and singing. Although it has been labelled as a "musical", it does not follow the classical conventions that correspond to this genre. The performers sing live songs that indeed unite the different elements of the performance, but the main part of the text is pre-recorded and then integrated into the soundtrack: a kind of radio play. The text is written by Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch author using a non-linear writing style. Like thoughts in the human brain the main plot of his texts are crossing secondary lines or take unexpected shortcuts to end up with a very personal coherence. The action on the stage is not a literal visualisation of a "story", but rather a translation, an echo, abstract comments that also influence the story and vice versa. Mutually interacting movements, images and songs give a different and changing perspective of the text.