(sweet) (bitter)

Thomas Hauert is a dancer and choreographer whose sophisticated, improvisation-based research on movement has a strong relation to music – either actual music or the musicality of the movement itself. In his solo, his dance interacts with the baroque madrigal Si dolce è’l tormento composed by Claudio Monteverdi on a text by Carlo Milanuzzi. Hauert interprets this musical poem of impossible love as the expression of a conflict between the bliss of pursuing an ideal and the torment of knowing that this ideal will stay unreachable – a tension which is a universal motor of life but takes as many forms, as many interpretations, as there are individual visions of this “perfect country”. In German, an untranslatable word exists to describe this exquisitely painful feeling of inextinguishable longing: Sehnsucht.