Where is everybody? by Thomas Hauert is a collaboration between members of his company ZOO and Platform K, an inclusive Flemish company of dancers with disabilities. It was presented at the Potsdamer Tanztage at T-Werk on 28 May, 2026.
A green curtain, the colour of Astroturf, forms an oval ring around the stage. The six performers — three from ZOO, an ensemble with almost thirty years of collaborations, and three from Platform K — enter from behind these veils one at a time, stand downstage, facing us, and pause. Time suspends and holds us together. They wear identical grey tracksuits, as though on the same sports team. As they look ahead, I become absorbed in the micro-movements of each dancer: slight swaying, flicking and focusing of eyes, breathing. A landscape of humans who bear themselves as such. Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, comes to mind: “a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the centre of our history.” Six humans open this work as a celebration of heterogeneous difference.
Thomas Hauert, ZOO’s choreographer, doesn’t conceal the structural stitches of the work as it unfolds, thereby revealing the dancers’ agential choices at every scale. A small table with a box of papers and a microphone stands on one side. Throughout the piece, they choose a paper and read aloud the name of one of ZOO’s improvisation tools. “Two Points” prompts Oskar Stalpaert to gently touch Mat Voorter and Anthony Quintard on different parts of their bodies; we watch these points travel through space until they meet, the contacted bodies unfolding responsive movement sequences. Each game opens into group action, specific and nuanced ways of dancing together that produce wildly rich individual movement and a palpable sense of their groupness in motion.
As the show progresses, I become enraptured by its accumulations; each provocation is paired with music the group chose collaboratively, from The Communards’ “Lovers and Friends” to Hildegard Knef’s “Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen,” under dynamic lighting that fades and reappears in rhythms like memories splicing in a reverie. Spoken German, French, Flemish, and English patchwork the piece further.
In one standout scene, Oskar dances with a monologue riffing on his Down Syndrome, renaming it Down Syndream: a bilingual pun on the invented German “Down Syntraum”. Traum, in German, means dream. The group clusters around him and sings phrases of affirmation in chorus, a support system of moving, sounding bodies forming a forcefield of echoing energy around his empowered delivery.
I first encountered Hauert’s work in a ten-day workshop in Paris in 2014. I was deeply inspired by the rigour and generosity of his improvisation practices, such as “Careful Scientist,” in which each joint is explored for its specific range of flexion and rotation, developing layers of contrapuntal movements. That workshop also introduced me to Thelonious Monk, whose stimulating melodies, dissonances, and percussive rhythms entered our dancing. Hauert’s complex practices offer abundant possibilities for qualities, rhythms, temporalities, emotions, and personalities to co-compose. Where is everybody? makes this potentiality vivid and shared. With the grey tracksuits swapped for multicoloured, diversely cut garments, the show culminates with the audience and ensemble united in the group’s relational dancing: a playful zone of interconnected alterity and joy.
Where is everybody? by ZOO /Thomas Hauert & Platform K was performed on May 28, 2026 as part of the Potsdamer Tanztage. Potsdamer Tanztage is presenting an extensive program of stage performances through June 7, 2026.