Theatre: Quartet for Fifteen Chairs

The instantly likeable and relentlessly inventive Quartet For Fifteen Chairs is classic Maiden Voyage Dance, brought alive from beginning to end with the poise, personality and physicality we have come to expect from the Belfast-based dance company.

Since debuting at the Belfast Children’s Festival in 2014, Enrique Cabrera’s piece has dazzled audiences in Northern Ireland, London and Switzerland, and its return home to an almost full house upstairs in Belfast’s MAC, coinciding with (not surprisingly) fifteen years of Maiden Voyage, strengthens its reputation as a wholly worthwhile, even necessary diversion for children and adults alike.

Those familiar with Maiden Voyage could consider Quartet For Fifteen Chairs, hereafter Quartet, to be a pioneer, a prototype even, for their latest movements. Elements of Quartet can be found in other recent Maiden Voyages: the intensity of Tipping Point, the graceful humanity of Neither Either and the playfulness of the exceptional Pause And Effect, which was a sort of Quartet For Sixty Blocks.

As with that Quartet, props are key, choreographer Cabrera using newspapers, small blue chairs and a superb score by Brian Irvine (in my opinion, the best music Maiden Voyage have worked with) to create a memorable atmosphere.

As Ciaran Bagnall’s lighting dips, then rises, we are greeted by the sight of the four performers, Carmen Fuentes Guaza, David Ogle, Ryan O’Neill and Vasiliki Stasinaki, sidestepping and tiptoeing their way onto the stage with one newspaper each. We can’t hear what they’re mumbling about the Daily News, but it’s quite possible that they’re rather puzzled and intrigued, as a curious child stumbling across the non-comical sections of a paper might be.

The pre-occupation and muttering gently, unexpectedly metamorphoses into active movement and creativity alongside Irvine’s emergent background instruments, tempos and vocals. The dancers’ feet aren’t really in sync with Irvine’s early beats, but it doesn’t matter: everything they do with their papers and limbs entrances, as a show of childlike imagination finding its way on a later to be chair-filled stage.

When the first chair appears, the tall Ogle lifts it high. He won’t give it back! Cue childish frustration from the others. But, rather than dwell on this, focus swiftly swifts to O’Neill, another chair and Irvine’s vibrating vibrato of strings and finger clicks, the signature tune of this piece. (It’s finger-clickin’ good.)

As Fuentes Guaza takes a chair herself, we now know that the papers are essentially irrelevant, and that the dancing quartet will think less about the daily news and more about their daily moves. It is an efficient and effective transition from words to actions: a matter of working with and around the numerous chairs of the title.
Each dancer becomes “at one” with up to four chairs each - now you know why up to fifteen chairs are required! - and the best of Cabrera’s imagery is presented.

Stasinaki wobbles with a chair between her legs. Ogle and Fuentes Guaza’s fight over a chair unexpectedly and rather sweetly transforms into a balletic triplet between two dancers and the inanimate object. Darkness adorns the stage as Stasinaki and O’Neill use a torch to light their way over chair-like “stepping stones” while accompanied by ominous operatic music.

Fuentes Guaza repeatedly tries to sit down only to find at the last minute that there’s no chair there. All while the dancers wear “not quite to be trusted” expressions on their faces: a sign that Quartet will always surprise, and often amuse.
The final movements are less spectacular, but in hindsight this is entirely understandable, a way of the dancers “letting it go” in a boundless show of relief. And there is still time for the cherry-topping conclusion of Ogle carrying fourteen chairs exquisitely balanced together in a heap - a triumphant finale for the admirable, inspiring quartet and Quartet before us.


Simon Fallaha

Quartet For Fifteen Chairs was performed at the MAC on 07and 08 October and will later be performed at Newtownabbey’s Theatre At The Mill on 18 October and Omagh’s Strule Arts Centre on 20 October.