Fourteen acrobats and a string quartet celebrate Shostakovich’s music in the Symphony Hall of the Auditorio de Tenerife
The Auditorio de Tenerife has scheduled Opus by the Australian contemporary circus company Circa for next weekend. This production fuses extreme acrobatics and lyrical movement set to the music of one of the great 20th-century composers, Dmitri Shostakovich. Performances will take place on Saturday (May 3) and Sunday (May 4) at 7.30 p.m.
Shostakovich’s quartets are, by turns, intimate, passionate, lyrical, ironic, and deeply moving personal testimonies by one of the 20th century’s greatest composers. In Opus, three of his quartets form the musical and dramatic spine of a red-hot fusion of extreme acrobatics, lyrical movement, and group choreography, performed by fourteen acrobats.
Opus begins with a solo performer suspended on a rope serenaded by musicians. It then rapidly alternates scenes of dislocated stillness and violent explosions into geometries of acrobats intersected by extreme physicality to arrive at exquisitely detailed and nuanced choreographies of acrobats flying, balancing, and landing.
Circa’s show explores the complex relationships between the individual and the group, between the march of history and the dictates of the heart and between the tragic and the comic. This is a ground-breaking work of intense power, melding music and bodies at the highest level. Opus has been performed 113 times to audiences of more than 80,000 people. Premiering in 2013 in Lyon, France, the production has since toured extensively, with performances in France, Spain, Australia, Germany, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Greece, Canada, the United States, Turkey, Hungary, Hong Kong, and Mexico.
The tickets have a single price between 15 and 5 Euros, and just 10 Euros for audiences under 30 years of age. The tickets are available on the website www.auditoriodetenerife.com, at the auditorium’s box office or by dialling the phone number 902 317 327 from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Check the special discounts for, among others, students, unemployed people and large families.