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- Cheryl Frances-Hoad
Quark Dances (2014)
- Cadenza Music (World)
Commissioned by Rambert for their 2014/15 season and premiered at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth on 24th September 2014. The work, which in performance formed part of a triptych entitled 'The Strange Charm of Mother Nature (with J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, and Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks) was choreographed by Rambert's Artistic Director, Mark Baldwin.
Programme Note
Theorised and discovered in the 1960s, quarks – so-named after James Joyce's nonsense 'Three quarks for Muster Mark' (Finnegan's Wake, 1939) - are subatomic elementary particles representing the smallest units of matter. A key constituent within the make-up of hadrons (baryons, mesons) but otherwise impossible to observe directly or isolate singularly, they come in six 'flavours' (which determine property but cannot be 'tasted') - up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top – divided into three 'generations' and three arbitrary 'colour charges' (which cannot be 'seen') – blue, green, red. 'We are all agglomerations of quarks and electrons': 'all you need to make a human – and all you need to make a rock' (Brian Cox).
The five Quark Dances make up the final third of Mark Baldwin’s ballet on the origins of the cosmos, 'The Strange Charm of Mother Nature', inspired by a visit to the Large Hadron Collider (CERN, Geneva) and premiered by the Rambert Dance Company at Sadler's Wells, November18, 2014. 'In brightly coloured catsuits, Rambert’s dancers represent different “flavours” of quark […] and dance more or less energetically according to the habits of that “flavour” – signalled by the changing position and [Scriabinesque] colour of the bright line projected on the backcloth' (Hanna Weibye, The Arts Desk).
To a degree the Dances pay homage to the two (related) companion pieces comprising Baldwin's original triptych – Stravinsky's neoclassical 'Dumbarton Oaks' Concerto and Bach's Third Brandenburg: most obviously in the G 'tonality' and division of violins, violas and cellos into three each (Bach), and the addition of flute, clarinet, bassoon and paired horns (Stravinsky). A baroque-resonant harpsichord takes on a concertante rôle in the toccata-like figurations of the second movement, and a more plectile conversazione one in the fourth (where the bassoon has a Dumbarton quote, balancing the Bach one of the first movement). The central dance evokes an inferno of tones and torn-apart temperaments vacillating in a chromosphere between biblical Chaos and current Big Bang, the lode-star of a horn call thrice sounded conjuring what one might will – Godhead, Creator, the Force. Lisztian metamorphosis and cyclic recollection link the outer movements.
© Ates Orga
The five Quark Dances make up the final third of Mark Baldwin’s ballet on the origins of the cosmos, 'The Strange Charm of Mother Nature', inspired by a visit to the Large Hadron Collider (CERN, Geneva) and premiered by the Rambert Dance Company at Sadler's Wells, November18, 2014. 'In brightly coloured catsuits, Rambert’s dancers represent different “flavours” of quark […] and dance more or less energetically according to the habits of that “flavour” – signalled by the changing position and [Scriabinesque] colour of the bright line projected on the backcloth' (Hanna Weibye, The Arts Desk).
To a degree the Dances pay homage to the two (related) companion pieces comprising Baldwin's original triptych – Stravinsky's neoclassical 'Dumbarton Oaks' Concerto and Bach's Third Brandenburg: most obviously in the G 'tonality' and division of violins, violas and cellos into three each (Bach), and the addition of flute, clarinet, bassoon and paired horns (Stravinsky). A baroque-resonant harpsichord takes on a concertante rôle in the toccata-like figurations of the second movement, and a more plectile conversazione one in the fourth (where the bassoon has a Dumbarton quote, balancing the Bach one of the first movement). The central dance evokes an inferno of tones and torn-apart temperaments vacillating in a chromosphere between biblical Chaos and current Big Bang, the lode-star of a horn call thrice sounded conjuring what one might will – Godhead, Creator, the Force. Lisztian metamorphosis and cyclic recollection link the outer movements.
© Ates Orga
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