OPUS by Circa Featuring the Debussy Quartet

Created by Yaron Lifschitz with the Debussy Quartet and the Circa Ensemble

Ten acrobats and a string quartet celebrate the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in a work of stunning power, virtuosity and physical poetry.

Shostakovich’s quartets are by turns intimate, passionate, lyrical, ironic and deeply moving personal testimonies by one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers. In Opus, three of his quartets form the musical and dramatic spine of a red-hot fusion of extreme acrobatics, lyrical movement and group choreography.

Beginning with a solo performer suspended on a rope serenaded by musicians, Opus then moves powerfully through rapidly alternating scenes of dislocated stillness and violent explosions into extreme physicality to arrive at exquisitely detailed and nuanced geometries of acrobats flying, balancing and landing.

Opus explores the complex relationships between the individual and the group, between the march of history and what dictates the heart, and between the tragic and the comic. Opus is a melding of music and bodies at the highest level producing a groundbreaking work of intense power.

Support for this program is made possible by generous donors who have committed time and resources to the Charleston Gaillard Center’s Dance Initiative.