Beauty of Accident

(2012 – 2013)

Beauty of Accident is the final work in QUARTO’s second trilogy, continuing the duo’s long-term research at the intersection of choreography and philosophy. The work explores rhythm, repetition, difference, the relationship between bodies and objects, and the forces that shape perception, identity, and movement.

Two bodies are connected by a rope. The rope evokes, without being strictly identified with, Ariadne’s thread, a safety line, a web, the thread of destiny, the cord that connects us to one another, the rhizome, and the fragile thread between life and death. Rather than functioning simply as a prop, the rope becomes an active agent in the choreography, continuously altering the relationship between the two bodies.

The research asks: Can movement be liberated from time through repetition that is never repeated identically? How can bodies remain in a state of permanent difference? What happens when bodies attempt to enter the field of rhythm?

For QUARTO, rhythm is understood not as periodic repetition, but as “an absence of periodic repetitions”—a state of permanent inequality and difference. The work therefore distinguishes rhythm from cadence and approaches rhythm as “the force that life finds in order to engage itself in chaos.”

The relationship between body and object is another central axis of the work. What happens to the body when it encounters an object? What happens when an object is imposed upon the body? Can movement originate from an object? How can an object regain a subjectivity that has been lost through its reduction to function?

A rope can bind, connect, support, threaten, or become a weapon. Its meaning shifts according to its use and its relationship to the body. The object, therefore, is never fixed in itself, but emerges through a particular relation between subject, perception, and use.

The empty and undefined space that runs throughout QUARTO’s Beauty series becomes an important territory for this investigation. Emptiness becomes an entrance into subjectivity, allowing pre-established forms to dissolve and opening a field of forces. Drawing on Nietzsche’s notion of active forces, QUARTO investigates what might emerge when habitual forms and structures are disrupted.

The research begins with impulses generated by forces that potentiate or diminish us. How can we resist the forces that make us weak, anxious, or constrained from governing our lives? How do such forces shape our identities, functions, habits, relationships, and interactions with objects?

Beauty of Accident seeks to work with vibrations, intensities, and forces, dissolving the conventional presence of the performer as a character with a personal history, psychological representation, or narrative. Through action, QUARTO attempts to move beyond habit, ego, drama, and fixed dualities—including those between two bodies, woman and man—toward an impersonal presence: an empty body without a predetermined story or plot.

The accident, in this sense, becomes a possibility: a space for the unforeseen, where forms can dissolve and new relations can emerge.

As part of this process, QUARTO understands artistic practice not as the production of a definitive object, but as an ongoing mode of inquiry. Each work reveals only one moment within a much larger process of questioning, experimentation, and transformation. Through this continuous engagement with forces and thought, the duo seeks to challenge established paradigms, generate new questions, and perhaps discover other possible modes of existence.

BEAUTY SERIES

FEAR — 2010–2011
DESPAIR — 2011–2012
ACCIDENT — 2012–2013

Beauty of Accident is the final work of QUARTO’s second series, initiated in 2010 as part of the duo’s long-term, process-based artistic research.

Across the series, QUARTO investigates beauty in contexts where it might not conventionally be expected. Fearexamines fear as a contemporary form of beauty through mechanisms of control and the suppression of courage. Despairdisrupts beauty by breaking harmony and producing disorder. Accident approaches beauty through non-essential causes, chance, and the possibility of the unforeseen.

Together, the three works ask: What does beauty have to do with all of this?

Presentations

World Premiere: INKONST, Malmö / MDT, Stockholm — January 31–February 2, 2013
Further presentations: March 15–16, 2013; October 3–4, 2013
Touring: 15 countries

Credits

Choreography, Concept & Performance: Anna Mesquita & Leandro Zappala
Sound Design: Philippe Boix-Vives
Video: Palle Lindqvist
Poet: Naima Chahboun
Philosopher: Fredrika Spindler
Graphic Design & Production: QUARTO

Sponsor: Pille Repmakarn

Co-production: SITE – Production Centre for Performing Arts

Supported by: Swedish Arts Council; Stockholm City Culture Committee; The International Dance Programme – Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Dance Artists.