Quintette cercle

A fundamental, leaping, singing ballet.

Have a slice of the show. We sing of, to, and for, Galina Ustvolskaya’s music – which includes some of the densest pieces of the 20th century. We sing them as if they were popular hits of today, to be heard regularly on the radio. The whole of modernity, the whole of Russia, the whole soul: this music seems to embrace wholeness. The whole of History. And we in turn embrace this music whose wholeness can only shimmer. Voice and body share space following a strict code. The one’s rhythms nourish the other’s leaps, to form an amalgam. A kind of fissured stone gone mad. We hold hands in a ring in the old-fashioned way. The dance only happens when we leave the circle, the singing, the music – this link that we have in common. Dance takes hold of us as soon as we let go hands, then leaves us straight away when we go back to our places… furtively. And furtively, we search for the alternative space which lets us live in this world as in a fundamental ballet.

For the visitor couched down in front of the pseudo-installation héâtre-élévision, the multiple shows that form it are revealed only in part, when the piece is dissected. Each dance is meticulously reduced to minuscule television size. The extract from Quintet Circle shown in heatre-élévision is filmed from afar, and the energy of the dancers’ faces, and of the dance itself, can only be guessed. When the film was being made, one thing became obvious: that if Quintet Circle managed to squash itself into the television set, it would be in order to emerge from it all the greater. We dreamed of a live version whose power would actually fill real theatre volume… and which would be our revenge on pixel-ised faces and flattened physicality. This is it.

Boris Charmatz