Квартет-а-тет_Андеграунд

The conductor and music teacher Ad Maas until recently lived in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where he built a rich musical life with remarkable regular festivals and powerful projects. The Eindhoven “Parktheater” commissioned a performance from the “Kyiv Modern Ballet” theatre – and Ad Maas wrote a driving piece especially for it: a quartet for four cellos. When you watch the performance “Quartet-a-tête”, danced by two girls and two young men, you constantly keep in mind that the body of a cello is, in shape, exactly like a human body, and its voices are just the same. And these four on stage try to say something and cut one another off mid-word, even taping each other’s mouths shut.

One part of their life, with its complicated relationships, we see as it is, while the other appears wondrous, mysterious, even magically fantastical – because of what happens behind a semi-transparent curtain. The four people very quickly find themselves now here, where contemporary choreography reigns, now there, where a shadow theatre instantly takes shape with its silhouette metamorphoses. They try to squeeze through from there to here – to overcome this light fabric by any means, yet so that it stays where it is.

By coincidence, the premiere took place just as several outstanding shadow theatres from different countries were touring Kyiv one after another. Radu Poklitaru watched and concluded: “They handle lighting equipment more deftly than we do, but we move far better than they do”.

The premiere took place on 24 and 26 June 2010.