Impossible love

Music plays a crucial role in the work of the dancer and choreographer Thomas Hauert. In his new solo (sweet) (bitter), he dances to various different versions of Monteverdi’s baroque madrigal Si dolce è’l tormento and to 12 Madrigali by Salvatore Sciarrino. For Hauert, this musical poem about impossible love symbolises the tension between longing for an ideal and understanding the tormenting truth that the ideal will remain out of reach. This tension, as a universal engine for life, can take on as many guises as there are individual visions of the ‘promised land’.

• In 1991 the Swiss-born Thomas Hauert came to Brussels to dance at Rosas and later with Pierre Droulers. He soon began to create his own work and in 1998, he set up the company ZOO. Since then, he has been a permanent fixture in the Kaaitheater’s dance programme.

Stellar, cosmic

Pulse Constellations takes as its starting point John McGuire’s 1978 electronic composition Pulse Music III. This complex musical piece combines rhythms, tempos and melodies in a series of 24 sections that are unexpectedly and abruptly woven together. The quality of the sounds, the fullness of the composition and its constantly confusing movement through the space lends the piece a stellar, cosmic air.

In this fascinating dance solo, Gabriel Schenker deconstructs and reconstructs McGuire’s musical web. He explores the boundary between the scientific and the organic, between the digital precision of electronic music and the analogue imprecision of dance, and between the danceable and the audible.

• Gabriel Schenker came from the US to Brussels eleven years ago to study at PARTS. He has danced for Rosas, Thomas Hauert and Eleanor Bauer, amongst others, and was joint founder of the dance collective Busy Rocks. Pulse Constellations is his first solo creation.

…a being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past, two footprints perpetually obliterating one another, toe to heel, heel to toe. – W. B. Yeats, A Vision