Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker tg STAN
Quartett
novembernov 28 - december – dec 28
Conceived by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jolente De Keersmaeker, Cynthia Loemij, Frank Vercruyssen
Text, Heiner Müller, Quartett
With Cynthia Loemij, and Frank Vercruyssen
Stage and lighting design, Herman Sorgeloos, Thomas Walgrave
Costumes, An D’Huys
A production by tg STAN ; Rosas
A Kaaitheater (Brussels) coproduction (1999)
In coproduction with La Monnaie / De Munt (Brussels)
In association with Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris
With participation from MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bobigny) as part of its artists residency programme
First performed on 4 mars 1999 at Kaaitheater (Brussels)
The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès is the patron of the Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Portrait
In partnership with France Inter
Created in 1999, Quartett is the first collaboration between Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and the company tg STAN. In this production, which heightens the tension between body and text, theatrical syntax and the expressive capacities of dance, an actor and a female dancer question the sense relations of Heiner Müller’s text.
In focusing on the permanent state of war between two individuals, Heiner Müller retains no more than the mere skeleton of Laclos’ work, Dangerous Liaisons. Valmont and Morteuil, a man and a woman, exchange roles. The dropping of masks which ensues, sheds light upon the darker elements of this domination-based relationship, and the reversibility of masculine and female positions. Müller strips the work down to its bare essentials, and then proceeds to bring out the interplay stemming from this reversal of values at the very heart of language itself. The result is an overturning of all temporal and genre-related reference points. Whilst this is not the first time Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has confronted dance with literature, as she did recently with Shakespeare - Golden Hours () - or Rilke, this collaboration with the company tg STAN constitutes one of her first incursions into the text domain. How can a sentence be converted into gestures, from sense to senses? In just the same way as Müller whittles language down to its bare essentials, tgSTAN and Rosas attempt to transplant their modes of representation, redistributing the places occupied by dance and acting. Onstage, an actor and a dancer embody two menacing figures. Amidst the tense to-ing and fro-ing, movement and word search for themselves, avoiding and clashing with each other all the while. In the re-working of this hybrid show, dance and the spoken word find themselves walking a tightrope, hovering above the abyss, on the frontier between silence and collapse.
Running time : 1h20
Performed in English with French subtitles
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