Gandini

Quartet was initially programmed as one half of a double bill, alongside Stop Breaking My Balls , and stayed in the company’s repertoire in various formats for a number of years. One version used only classical music and toured the Caixa Forum’s classical-music circuit in Spain.

After the larger ensemble works produced between 1998 to 2000, Gandini Juggling contracted down to four core performers, using this as an opportunity to take stock of their situation and to return to working with pure juggling. As part of this process, Gandini Juggling made a deliberate choice to return to their earlier experiments. In doing so, they sought to increase the breadth and depth of these investigations. This often involved the company choosing and then reworking specific sections of existing pieces whose potential, they felt, had not been fully explored. One of the results of this process was Quartet, which was constructed out of material from various sources. These sources included the works Light Balls (2002), Siteswaps (2002), Colours (2002), and a bounce-juggling section which had originated in experiments at the Dome and was to be refined in the later work No Exit (2004).

It is important to note that Quartet was the first of Gandini Juggling’s works that centred on a direct relationship between musical structures and juggling patterns. Although the company’s commercial work had, of course, used music as a supporting element, their previous stage-based works had generally utilised compositional principles which deliberately resisted choreographing patterns to music. Sean Gandini describes the source of this work as a desire to explore a one-to-one relationship between music and juggling and says that “previous works had a more elliptical and perhaps more complex dialogue between the juggling and the music.”.

(orginal text from Juggling Trajectories, Gandini Juggling 1991 – 2015 by Thomas J M Wilson - link to shop)


PRESS

"A celebration of jugging in all its forms" Total Theatre Magazine


THE TEAM

Director: The Company
Choreography: Gill Clarke and the Company
Lighting Designer: Jean-Ba Laude
Performers: Iñaki Fernández Sastre, Sean Gandini, Manu Laude, Owen Reynolds, Kati Ylä-Hokkala
Music: ‘Yo Shakespeare’ by Michale Gordon; ‘Rite of Spring’ by Stravinsky; ‘Concerto in G Minor’ (RV 106) 2nd and 3rd movements; ‘Concerto in F Major’ (RV 98) 1st movement; ‘La Tempesta di Mare’ by Antonio Vivaldi