Repertoire

Quartet-a-tête

music by Ad Maasballet in one act

Duration: 0:25 (25 min)
Acts: 1
Age: 12+
Staging: Radu Poklitaru — Honoured Arts Figure of Ukraine

The premiere of the production took place on June 24 and 26 2010

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.

About the show

The one-act ballet "Quartet-a-tête" was staged at the request of the Eindhoven "Park Theatre" and set to the music by the Dutch composer AD Maas who created a quartet for four cellos specially for the choreographer Radu Poklitaru and the theatre's cast. The music, marvelously combining tunefulness and the sharp modern character of sounding, formed the basis for the choreographic parable for four dancers. The absence of a clear-cut story is not an impediment - it rather helps to reveal the relationship between the characters. Psychological nuances and stage effects never used previously on the national ballet stage are the main distinctive features of the performance, having no counterparts in the theatre's repertoire.

Premiered on the stage on June 24, 26. 2010

Radu Poklitaru

Four cellos, four dancers, no scenery - just a white cloth separating two worlds. I, basically the admirer of the plot ballet, felt a sudden urge to create an abstract performance.
Ad Mass's music never failed to inspire me throughout the rehearsing period, cloaking me in images, fantasies and emotions. Although I do not know the composer personally, by the end of the work I felt as if we had been acquainted for decades