Rehearsing Exits

This article reflects on the creation of The Last Quartet, a dance work conceived by choreographer and performer Seke Chimutengwende, with collaborators Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Charlie Ashwell, Matthias Sperling, composer Jamie McCarthy and dramaturg Efrosini Protopapa. Beginning from the question of what it might mean to dance ‘at the end’, the text approaches ‘lastness’ as a premise that shapes the thinking, the working principles, and the felt conditions of the piece. Drawing on resonances with T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the article considers how endings may hold both celebration and mourning, and how naming a dance ‘the last’ creates a conceptual frame that the material continually fills, exceeds, and unsettles.Co-written by two performers and the dramaturg, the article gathers reflections arising part way through the creation process, making space for the shifting conversations and questions that accompany the work. The writing becomes an extension of the rehearsal room, recording how the group attends to entrances and exits, to the transitions and transformations that unfold in-between. The text follows the speculative quality of the work itself, in which lastness acts less as a conclusion than as a prompt for noticing what persists, what appears unexpectedly, and what might be emerging.The article also addresses recurring themes in the process, including the interplay between choreography and improvisation, the role of exhaustion, and the uncertainties that accompany any attempt to work with the idea of an ending. It reflects on how the principles of collaboration – shared attention, offering and withdrawing, stepping forward and stepping back – become material for both the dance and the writing. In this way, the text remains partial and provisional, oriented towards the ongoing question of what comes after ‘the last’

Ballet · Choreography · Dance · Performing arts · Premise · Rehearsing · Spectacle · Diverse Musicological Studies · Human auditory perception and evaluation · Literature and Cultural Memory

• Exhausting Dance

  André Lepecki•Exhaust Dance Perf and Pol Move•2006

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