Daniel Léveillé - Quatuor Tristesse

Quatuor tristesse is the mature work of a mature artist, it is one of Daniel Léveillé’s most accomplished pieces, in a portfolio of works spanning a career that is exemplary even for the younger generations of Canadian dance. Austere in its essential beauty, Quatuor tristesse relies on an alphabet of forms carved into the raw material of dance, with radical rigour and the delicacy of vulnerability, and a touch of sweetness.
Quatuor tristesse dialogues with the theme of solitude, which Léveillé has already addressed in earlier choreographies. The rifts, the disillusionments, the vibrations of the soul are the core of the narrative in a revealing, intuitive, extremely precise pièce, in which nudity is the ideal and necessary costume, apart from the everyday conventions, in the sculptural purity of the body, devoid of artifice.