You’ve changed

You’ve changed takes his quest for choreographing in a real-time dialogue with the body’s intelligence and intuition to new heights. In You’ve changed, everything originates from a movement improvisation in a sort of integrated system of unpredictable behavior. As with a chain reaction, this improvisation led to the creation of a video, then music, then another piece of music, then another improvisation, then lights, elements that finally come together in response to one another on stage, unfolding in a game of almost psychedelic interplay between artistic forms. For Hauert, as for collaborating composer Dick van der Harst, the elegance of multiplying these levels of complexity is the least they could offer their audiences.

The matrix of You’ve changed is movement, or more precisely a choreography unfolding as an unpredictable but integrated system without a central directing agent. Which means that the dancers are at each moment responsible for inventing and performing their own movement material, as well as initiating and developing all group structures. They must adapt their individual roles within a group constellation whose mechanics are constantly changing. As in a chain reaction, this improvised choreography formed the base for the creation of a video, then a music, then another music, then new improvised movement, then lights, all these proposals finally answering each other on stage. Here, in other words, a self-structuring choreography becomes the structure on which everything else is built : the individual creative decision-making, with its imperfections too, as the foundation stone for a highly complex and polyphonic piece. One could perceive here a longing for form in times where form is – perhaps rightly so – distrusted for its authoritarian and simplifying arbitrariness. Hauert does not design form but sets up processes that have an inherent will to form. Form always emerges, often surprisingly, but never quite gets completed.

Hauert nourishes a deep interest for the complex relationship between music and dance. But this time, he reversed the traditional dance-to-music order by asking Dick van der Harst – artist in residence at LOD and famous a.o. for collaborations with Belgian directors Alain Platel and Eric De Volder – to create an original composition based on a dance – filtered through video. Written for a three-person ‘rock band’ and three female singers, this music served in turn as material for Peter Van Hoesen, who interpreted it by digital means to create electronic tracks. The two musical worlds, the analog and the digital, are connected to each other and, somehow, to the movement on stage – by a process of mutual influence.