“...The four performers draw me in to their stories: brave, honest and revealing. It is almost as if we are witnessing ‘behaviour’ rather than steps or even choreography...”
We are now three months in to making Two Quartets. For this entry I want to reflect on the quartet of Henry, Deb, Pari and Sarah having just seen a run in the studio of the work they have created so far.
Sue has set out to make a work based on portraits so there is a frontal reference too much of the action with the four performers repeatedly trying to tell something of themselves to the viewer. In stark contrast, our quartet is literally built upon the idea of relating to each other with timings, dynamics and directions. By not creating conventional relationships between these four characters, Sue has created an atmosphere that almost feels like a public space. People walk directly across the studio oblivious to the movement that exists beside them, like corridors in a building. This gives me the impression that we are shown a slice of a much larger world, as if there are other goings on beyond the performance area and that we came upon these four individuals quite by chance. I believe there is possibly a hint of Samuel Beckett in this quartet with the displaced slightly absurd characters.
The four performers draw me in to their stories: brave, honest and revealing. It is almost as if we are witnessing ‘behaviour’ rather than steps or even choreography, instead impulses, tics, reactions, mundane and foreign gestures suggest who they are. There is a delicacy and fragility about the dances that I love and since the dancers worked for a good month without any sound they have a wonderful musicality woven into their physical language.
The music for this quartet is still in development and Matteo has found it understandably challenging. I believe that, for her last few creations, Sue has been steering away from the use of conventionally melodic music because of its potentially seductive or dominant presence in dance work. She has been researching with the company ways to imbue the movement with intrinsic rhythmic scores, using texts or timing rule bases to create surprising phrasing. This enables the two mediums to meet half way and retain their autonomy like any healthy relationship!
The wonderfully unpredictable music Matteo has created throws up some odd juxtaposition, every so often coming round to agree with the action like a deeply satisfying breath of cool air. At one point simple and spare piano chords gently cradle the movement and all I can say is it creates a stunning moment of ‘heart’ that without the discord before, would simply lose its power.
On first viewing the sound and action seem pretty dense. For me to keep engaged in the detailed movement I needed it to encompass the musical activity with more moments of physical stillness.
It is hard to compare the two works simply because I am inside one of them, but I believe the visceral energy and spatial fullness of our quartet is its power, whereas it is detail and sparseness that makes the other quartet engaging. The desire now for either work to venture into the others territory is, in my eyes, the potential danger. The danger of middle ground!
