Alban Richard is work­ing on a piece that jux­ta­poses the scores of four per­formers, remixed in a lively, dynam­ic explor­a­tion of the quartet.

For his new piece – sched­uled for 2025 – Alban Richard turns his atten­tion to the for­mula of the quar­tet, the addi­tion of four soloists whose scores coex­ist. This autonomy and jux­ta­pos­i­tion are also those of the DJ, com­bin­ing music pieces that were nev­er inten­ded to coex­ist. In a piece irrig­ated by the velo­city and dynam­ism of DJing, Alban Richard works on remix­ing ges­tures and move­ments: tak­ing up, quot­ing, past­ing, divert­ing, accel­er­at­ing, slow­ing down, repeat­ing, deform­ing into scratches, syn­co­pat­ing into micro-cuts. These are tools that the cho­reo­graph­er will apply to the per­formers’ bod­ies and voices, com­bin­ing them with an aes­thet­ic of stam­mer­ing to focus not on phras­ing but on the loop or micro-loop. What is at stake is the idea of a highly inhab­ited body, tra­versed by con­trary states, like those of people under the influ­ence of drugs inter­viewed by Amer­ic­an pho­to­graph­er Mark Laita. With Quar­tet, Alban Richard sees his cho­reo­graph­ic writ­ing as a cine­mat­ic mont­age, guided by sequen­cing tech­niques and attent­ive to ques­tions of tem­por­al sequences and breaks. A work set in an indis­tinct but troubled time, where the sceno­graphy is inspired by the didascalia of Hein­er Müller­’s Quar­tett (1980): “A salon from before the French Revolu­tion. A bunker after the Third World War”.