Tactile Quartet(s)

In Tactile Quartet(s), Vera Tussing builds on her earlier choreographic explorations in the sensory engagement of an audience. This time, she has invited the string quartet Quatuor MP4 to join four dancers onstage for a playful encounter between movement and sound. What happens when we take the movements of a string quartet seriously as a choreography, and dance along?

The four musicians play passages from various quartets by Franz Schubert, Anton Dvorak and Florence Price as well as contemporary works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Caroline Shaw. As they play, the musicians engage in one-on-one tactile encounters with the audience, creating physical interaction. Everything arises from touch – a bow on a string, an arm on a shoulder, an acoustic sensation on your skin. The dancers mediate the encounter between musicality and tactility, their choreography oscillating between touch, sight, and hearing. At the point where the orbits of dance and music intersect, you are invited to enter the kaleidoscopic score. Lend a hand, or an arm!

• Choreographer Vera Tussing has focused for many years on the sensorial, such as in her works T-Dance, Mazing, The Palm of Your Hand or Duet the City. She has been an artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater since 2017.

'The tactile quartet does indeed ask what it means for the spectators to become part of the performance and be looked at. All these elements come together to contribute to the artist’s enduring effort to trouble ‘spectatorship’ as we know it.’ – Etcetera