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Intimate Hakken: Lisa Vereertbrugghen Is Bringing Gabber Culture Into the Dance World

According to choreographer Lisa Vereertbrugghen, gabber can be intimate, bring people together, and might even have a political dimension. In recent years, she has introduced this intense electronic music, which reached its peak popularity in the Low Countries around the year 2000, to the world of contemporary dance.

“Gabbers listen to hardcore techno that plays at two hundred beats per minute. They wear Nike Air Max sneakers, they live to party, they shave their heads bald.” We hear the hoarse, iconic voice of Flemish journalist Paul Jambers, who offers the Flemish television audience some context for the scene: gabber as a rock-hard subgenre of dance music.

 In Jambers’ report, gabbers are white, individualistic young men and women who can be found to be furiously hakken (ed: or gabber dancing, hardcore stomping, hardstyle stomping, the high-tempo, hand-and-footwork-driven dance closely associated with the gabber scene of the early 2000s) in the clubs of the Low Countries. Twenty-five years later, the work of choreographer Lisa Vereertbrugghen (1986) puts a very different side of this culture on show.

Domestic hardcore

“I don’t know very much about the contemporary dance world”, Lisa Vereertbrugghen tells me with false modesty at the start of our conversation. She started at Amsterdam’s School for New Dance Development with, in her own words, “zero knowledge of dance”, but soon more than caught up. Vereertbrugghen is a thoughtful, self-questioning maker. Since 2014, performances of her work total “only” five, each embedded in long processes of research, reflection, and writing about dance. Between her own productions, she dances in others’ creations or oversees dramaturgical developments of such works. In other words, she’s hardly lacking in her knowledge of the field, but she isn’t a part of the contemporary dance world in the way that Flanders is most familiar with, the world inhabited by names like Rosas or Wim Vandekeybus. Vereertbrugghen comes at it from a different angle.

Getting to know hardcore techno, the beating heart of her choreographies, took place in her mother’s kitchen, where her brother – a devotee of hakken – taught Lisa the steps as a youngster. The context is important, essential even, for the feeling that Vereertbrugghen connects with hardcore. Vereertbrugghen: “I learned to hak in a domestic setting. The clash between the aggression of the dance and the intimacy of the context was interesting to me. As a result of my first performance, Camouflaging Kelly (2014), I’d made a collection of YouTube videos about people who danced to gabber at home; in the bedroom, in the utility room, in the kitchen… In my first performances, I wanted to evoke that youthful experience, to investigate what I felt to hak again. That’s why I also use the I-form in Softcore, a Hardcore Encounter (2018). That performance begins with the sentence ‘I am hardcore’.”

Political potential

Hardcore techno is a style of music to which speed, intensity and disruption are central. Hakken is defined by angular movements of the body; short, powerful, repetitive motions of the hands and feet that appear to be interrupted and resumed at random. 160 beats per minute (bpm) is the minimum speed at which hakken is performed, but the speeds can reach up to 200bpm. Virtuosity is less important than really going for it. Vereertbrugghen: “Hakken follows a fairly simple logic, you don’t need any extraordinary technical skills for it. It’s like learning to walk: you have to keep doing it, and eventually you’ll succeed.”

A significant difference between this kind of ‘spontaneous’ dancing and Vereertbrugghen’s performances is that these are choreographed. In While We Are Here (2023), a performance through which she makes conceptual connections between gabber and folk dances, the five performers move across the stage in circular patterns. The timing of the movements and the relative positions of the bodies in the space are anchored in the choreography. And yet within this tight structure, there’s a moving amount of room for the dancers’ personalities.

Vereertbrugghen: “None of the dancers in While We Are Here had any experience with gabber or with techno in general. I was able to sketch out with each dancer a style unique to them, in which they could emphasise their own specific instincts, without straying too far from the idioms of gabber. That was a balancing act: when does a movement become so personal that it is too distinctive from the rest? Where is the point of equilibrium between personality and communality? Moreover, I choreograph the broader structures, and not each specific step; the dancers choose these for themselves.”

And in each dancer’s freedom to make individual choices shelters a political potential that returns us to the essential concept of ‘disruption’. Hardcore techno and gabber don’t produce a continuous, rousing flow in which the body (and soul!) can quietly disappear. There are too many breaks for this – too many interruptions in musical and physical lines – keeping the dancer paying attention. In theatre terminology, you might call these ‘metatheatrical’ moments in which the illusion of fiction is punctured, and the consciousness of the performer is emphasised. A gabber chooses to make such breaks of their own accord.

Lisa Vereertbrugghen: ‘These days, pleasure is very much embedded in consumption. For me, more anarchistic, political involvement with hardcore techno is about small-scale parties.’

Vereertbrugghen is at pains to point out that the intrinsic unruliness of music and dance doesn’t create ‘in itself’ a political dimension; context plays a role here, too. Vereertbrugghen: “Big hardcore techno events do promise their audiences a stirring experience, a sense of losing yourself. Personally, I have some issues with this kind of massive event, not least because ticket prices are pretty high. These days, pleasure is very much embedded in consumption. For me, more anarchistic, political involvement with hardcore techno is about small-scale parties. When I go out, I go to events that identify as queer, to places where there are no macho-vibes. Most of all, I love to dance with friends at their places.”

Pure affect

Another crucial difference between a club and a choreographed dance is the presence of a watching, non-dancing audience. “At 200bpm you can’t think”, Vereertbrugghen writes in a text about her dance practice. “There is no room for self-expression to still be concerned about self-representation.” In other words, there’s a risk that the audience will be watching performers sunk in their own bodies, slurped up by the beat, without any possibility for connection.

Vereertbrugghen is aware of this risk. “In While We Are Here, I slow the dance at the beginning down. If the dancers were to immediately start dancing at 160 beats per minute, it would be impossible to make a connection. Instead, each dancer can show themselves to and make a connection with the audience, and then accelerate from there. We want to take the audience with us on our trip, not leave them behind. Sure, by the end we’re all locked right into our own bubbles, but hopefully that’s where the audience is at that point, too.”

Seeking connection is more than a ‘technical’ question alone; it is also essential for what Vereertbrugghen seeks to achieve with her performances: the sharing of physical pleasure, of fully inhabiting one’s body. Vereertbrugghen: “If we see that the audience is moving with us, is vibrating, then we know we’re doing a good job.” Perhaps even more than an aesthetic, visual experience, she strives to create a sensitive, even sensual one. Vereertbrugghen: “How can I remind people that they have a body? How can I help them feel what I feel? Techno is abstract, it tells no story. It is pure affect in the here and now.”

Some years ago, Vereertbrugghen began experimenting with techno-meditation, in which she attempts to build up a mindful experience with a standing audience through movement and music. Vereertbrugghen: “In principle, you could do a meditation like this with classical music, too, but techno has the ideal frequencies. You feel the bass in your stomach and organs, the high frequencies on your skin and in your nerves.”

New underground

In recent years, there has been a rise in places where hardcore techno is played by more diverse DJs for a more diverse audience. Moreover, gabber – like other ‘popular’ dance styles – has sought and secured a place in the ‘serious’ bastion of contemporary dance. In the last ten years, this world, traditionally populated in the West by the intellectual heirs of postmodern dance, has seen itself enriched by genres like house, breaking and voguing. Vereertbrugghen thinks this has much to do with the fact that the dance sector is slowly making more space for other people and styles.

Thanks to YouTube and TikTok, underground dance worlds are unlocked for wider audiences – not always to the liking of those scenes themselves. The risk is that the characteristic traits of a popular dance style or subculture are adapted into a mainstream poetics, thereby losing their original power. Despite this, Vereertbrugghen sees mainly opportunities: “People will continue to find ways to express themselves, independently of what happens on the sanctioned stage. And so there will always be new undergrounds. At the same time, these stages do have the responsibility to give new makers opportunities, including those that don’t have the ‘right’ training.”

What may distinguish today’s dance world even more from that of the 1990s, though, is the growing consciousness regarding behaviours around bodies. In the slipstream of the worldwide #MeToo movement, Flanders had its fair share of stories about transgressive incidents, frequently within the live art forms, where the body is an important tool of the trade. The choreographer Jan Fabre claimed that transgression and physical exploitation made up an integral part of his poetics; sometimes even forming the aestheticized ‘goal’ of a performance.

Although the exhaustion of Vereertbrugghen’s performers is a visible result of the show, it is never the aim. “No way. In my performances it’s about the pleasure of being fully in your body. To get there, we do sometimes have to move through fatigue and frustration, but at the end of the show, it needs to be just as fun as it was at the start. I never push it to a breaking point. If there are performers who need a break for a drink or for rest during a performance, then I make room for that. Without their enjoyment, there is no show.”

It is noticeable that so far, Vereertbrugghen has always worked with female performers, but this isn’t a statement – at least not a conscious one. “I’m not interested in seeing the traditional tension between a man and a woman with its hypothetical romantic connotations play out on stage. I’m more fascinated by the bonds between women, whether they are romantic bonds or the bonds of complex friendship. And in any case, with an all female cast, this layer of normative gender relations falls away. And I also just like to work with performers that I get on well with.

Anti-patriarchal slow dancing

Vereertbrugghen is just as thoughtful about her plans for her career as she is about the development of her artistic research. It seems like she is in no hurry; she is weighing the pros and cons of her desires and opportunities, which need not necessarily lead to bigger stages, expanding scales or international recognition. At the moment, she is housed at Ghent art centre Campo, a home where she feels surrounded and safe. Here she has found an intimate context, again, as fertile ground for future choreographies.

Her new research lets go of hardcore techno after eleven years, to investigate a rather different dance form: the slow dance, or ‘sway’. Vereertbrugghen: “There is a lot of research potential in slow dancing. On the one hand, because the way it deals with time – the slowness – is technically interesting, and on the other hand, because it is very codified in terms of gender roles. Who is dominant? Who is submissive? Putting these roles into question intrigues me. I want to develop a practice around this through workshops and installations. Feel free to call it research into anti-patriarchal slow dancing.”

• choreography
• dance