PROJECT

In Tactile Quartet(s), Vera Tussing builds on her previous choreographic explorations in the sensory engagement of an audience. This time round, Tussing invites string quartet Quatuor MP4 to join four dancers on stage for a playful encounter between movement and sound. What if we take the movements of a string quartet seriously as a choreography – and dance along?

Four musicians play excerpts of multiple quartets from Franz Schubert, Anton Dvorak, Florence Price to contemporary works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Caroline Shaw. As the musicians engage in one-on-one tactile encounters with the audience members, they create a physical play back. Everything arises from touch – a bow on a string, an arm on a shoulder, a sound on your skin. The dancers mediate the encounter between musicality and tactility through a choreography that oscillates between the felt, the seen and the heard. At the point where the orbits of dance and music intersect, the audience is invited to enter into its kaleidoscopic score and asked to give a hand – or an arm.

Premiere: 19 and 20 October 2019 in Kaaitheater, Brussels