Vera Tussing & Quatuor MP4 - Tactile Quartet(s)

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 Quatour MP4 to join four dancers on stage for a playful encounter between movement and sound.

Four musicians play excerpts of multiple quartets from Franz Schubert, Antonin Dvořák, 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. 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.

Vera Tussing (°1982; Germany) graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School, and has worked as a dancer, director and creator throughout Belgium, the UK, Canada and across Europe. In 2011 she premiered Trilogy with Albert Quesada before going on to make the stage pieces T-Dance (2014), the movement-sound installation Sound Bed, The Palm of Your Hand (2015) and Mazing (2016). Both, Two, a duet in collaboration with Esse Vanderbruggen premièred in 2018.

Esse Vanderbruggen and Vera Tussing currently continue this duet cycle. The IN/FINITY project was part of Performatik 19 (Brussels). In October 2019, Tactile Quartet(s), a performance in which she expands her research into tactility to the discipline of music, will premiere at Kaaitheater. A central theme of Vera's work is how the different senses combine to structure our perception, and the creation of unique, inter-personal encounters between audience and performer. Being a former Research Associate at South East Dance (Brighton), Workplace artist at The Place and KAAP-maker (Oostende/Brugge), she is currently part of IN-FINITY (Brussels) and artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater.