Notturnino

Swiss choreographer Thomas Hauert’s Notturnino is a playful and poignant work that takes inspiration from the documentary Tosca’s Kiss, a touching film that follows the lives of retired opera singers living in a nursing home in Milan. This is a tightly structured piece of improvisation where the audience witness the dancers’ decisions resulting in a truly unique experience for each performance.

Choreographer’s Notes

My fascination with dance has a lot to do with its sensual aspects, with how dance/motion feels and what one can feel when looking at it. In the creation of Notturnino I took inspiration from the film ‘Tosca’s Kiss’, opera music and Candoco Dance Company’s dancers. The soundtrack from the film, which features the voices of ageing singers re-enacting scenes from operas and talking about their lives, but also the sounds of everyday life at their rest home, conjures images of situations and characters, triggering association and memories. I wanted the dance to add another layer of textures and sensations rather than being a literal illustration of the sound. I hope that the piece will elicit an individual response from each audience member and draw on their own memories, sensibilities and concerns. I always work with improvisation both in the process of creating a piece and on stage, as I believe that the body is capable of creating much more complex movement if you allow it to include intuition rather than relying on forms processed by our conscious mind.

Through scenes of boredom, puzzlement, affectation and tenderness, Notturnino intermittently but sympathetically invokes ideas of human vulnerability and vanitas.

The Guardian, March 2014