March 28th – 30th, 2025 Festival dansa metropolitana, Barcelona
November 17th, 2025 TANZINOLTEN, Olten
April 3rd – 4th, 2026 Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris
April 14th, 2026 Le 140, Brussels
60 minutes
A Solo for Himself
In his new solo, Thomas Hauert intends to deepen a creative process already present in his last two creations: making psychology, inner life, emotions and the unconscious a driving force behind movement. The starting point for Troglodyte is a kind of complex psychological enigma, expressed in the working title and subtitle of the solo Zaungast/Zaunkönig, focusing on the experience of the position of the outsider, the one who is not part of the group, the one who looks on from the outside. Zaungast is a German word that describes someone who attends an event to which they were not invited, behind the fence (literally: “guest of the fence”). Zaunkönig, literally “king of the fence”, is the German name for the wren, a small songbird. Tiny but kingly at the same time, it is imagined on the fence, ‘staying on the fence’, in the figurative sense of someone who does not take a stand, does not make up their mind and does not commit themselves accordingly.
The word troglodyte originally refers to a living creature that inhabits a cave or dwelling dug into the ground, like the little bird Zaunkönig/troglodyte. The term Troglodyte also sounds like an insult, one associated with the “Cave Man”, the boorish, uneducated, coarse man.
