What could be more beautiful and more painful than unrequited, impossible love? That is the great, timeless idea in Claudio Monteverdi’s opus Si dolce è’l tormento, at the end of which the lyricist, Carlo Milanuzzi, brings up the subject of repentance: a torment of conscience that may eventually catch up with the person who has rejected another. The spurned lover imagines that she will “sigh for me one day”. In this piece, choreographer Thomas Hauert takes on the role of the unrequited lover, dancing through the flashing will-o’-the-wisps of futile hopes driven by sweet and at the same time bitter torment. Monteverdi’s baroque music is framed by Salvatore Sciarrino’s twelve modern madrigals (which, by the way, are not about love but about nature). Longing is the magic word that runs through this solo, in which the non-achievement of ideals is expressed as a driving force of life. Hauert’s dance conveys longing as a composition of movement in all its extensive variety and in all the colours of almost pleasurable pain.
Austrian Premiere
Duration: 30 Minutes
