Quintett

Choreographer: William Forsythe
In collaboration with Dana Caspersen, Stephen Galloway, Jacopo Godani, Thomas McManus and Jone San Martin

Lyrical, committed and moving, Quintett is a quiet masterpiece set to Gavin Bryars’s “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” On stage filled with bright, white light, Quintett brilliantly evokes and develops Bryars’s themes of loss, hope, fear and joy. In Quintett the dancers set into motion a seamless flow of duets, solos and trios in counterpoint to the heartbeat of Gavin Bryars’s music. Weaving and tumbling, the dancers create an eddying force that grows in fluid, joyous complexity—a torrent containing, in its bright, vital vision, an awareness of its own eventual end.

Premiere
October 9, 1993 at Opernhaus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Lighting Design
William Forsythe

Costume Design 
Stephen Galloway

Music
Gavin Bryars, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (© Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz)

Staging
William Forsythe, Stephen Galloway, Thomas McManus and Jone San Martin

Length
26 minutes

Quintett