The Last Quartet

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time”

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

In The Last Quartet, Seke Chimutengwende imagines a “last work” or a “last attempt” at choreography. It’s an opportunity to go back to the beginning — back to the core elements of dancing and music, to imagine them anew.

Four dancers enter and exit the stage through gaps in the audience. They are figuring everything out through movement — how to begin, how to connect, how to change, how to end — leaving fleeting traces of scenes, relationships, and characters for the audience to contemplate. They share the stage with composer Jamie McCarthy, whose elegiac, electro-acoustic score evokes the slow and sudden changes of weather systems and cloud formations.

With no fixed sequences of movement and no fixed order of events, The Last Quartet offers a glimpse of limitless possibilities and new beginnings in this current moment where hope is scarce and futures lie everywhere in ruins.