Opus is a work of stunning power, virtuosity and poetry. Ten acrobats and a string quartet celebrate the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Shostakovich’s quartets are by turns intimate, passionate, lyrical, ironic and deeply moving personal testimonies by one of the 20^th 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.

Opus begins from a solo performer suspended on a rope serenaded by musicians, then moves through rapidly alternating 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.

Opus 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 groundbreaking work of intense power. A melding of music and bodies at the highest level.

Under the direction of circus visionary Yaron Lifschitz the Circa ensemble puts bodies on the line for Sacre in electrifying explosions of physicality and power.

10 acrobats and string quartet | 65 minutes