For other uses of the term, see Quad

Quad

Quad may refer to:-Architecture:*Quadrangle in architecture, e.g., on a university campus*Quad, a dormitory room or suite housing four residents...

.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

’s Quad was written in 1981 and first appeared in print in 1984 (Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...

) where the work is described as “[a] piece for four players, light and percussion

Percussion instrument

A percussion instrument is any object which produces a sound when hit with an implement or when it is shaken, rubbed, scraped, or otherwise acted upon in a way that sets the object into vibration...

” and has also been called a “ballet

Ballet

Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...

 for four people.” It resembles something the shape-theatre ensemble Mummenschanz

Mummenschanz

Mummenschanz is a Swiss pantomime troupe who perform in a surreal mask- and prop-oriented style. Founded in 1972 by Bernie Schürch, Andres Bossard , and the Italian-American Floriana Frassetto, the group became popular for its play with bizarre masks and forms, light and shadow, and their subtle...

 might have conceived, a frantic mime

Mime

The word mime is used to refer to a mime artist who uses a theatrical medium or performance art involving the acting out of a story through body motions without use of speech.Mime may also refer to:* Mime, an alternative word for lip sync...

. The only thing in the Beckett canon that is at all similar is the short mime at the beginning of What Where

What Where

What Where is Samuel Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as Quoi où and translated by Beckett himself....

.

The play was first transmitted by the Süddeutscher Rundfunk

Süddeutscher Rundfunk

The Süddeutscher Rundfunk was a German radio and television station operating in the northern part of the state of Baden-Württemberg. It existed from 1949 to 1998, when it was merged with the then Südwestfunk to form the Südwestrundfunk....

 in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 on 8 October 1981 – as Quadrat 1 + 2. Beckett himself directed (“assisted by Bruno Voges”). The four performers, all “members of the Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School”, were, Helfried Foron, Juerg Hummel, Claudia Knupfer and Susanne Rehe. The same performance was rebroadcast on 16 December 1982, by BBC Two

BBC Two

BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...

.

"Quad has a musical structure. It is a kind of canon

Canon (music)

In music, a canon is a contrapuntal composition that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration . The initial melody is called the leader , while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower...

 or catch - a mysterious square dance

Square dance

Square dance is a folk dance with four couples arranged in a square, with one couple on each side, beginning with Couple 1 facing away from the music and going counter-clockwise until getting to Couple 4. Couples 1 and 3 are known as the head couples, while Couples 2 and 4 are the side couples...

. Four hooded figures move along the sides of the square. Each has his own particular itinerary. A pattern emerges and collisions are just avoided" (Radio Times

Radio Times

Radio Times is a UK weekly television and radio programme listings magazine, owned by the BBC. It has been published since 1923 by BBC Magazines, which also provides an on-line listings service under the same title...

).

Background

As far back as 1963 Beckett had thought of creating a geometrical mime. He tried to write a piece for Jack MacGowran

Jack MacGowran

John Joseph "Jack" MacGowran was an Irish character actor, whose last film role was as the alcoholic director Burke Dennings in The Exorcist. He was probably best known for his work with Samuel Beckett.-Stage career:...

 (generally referred to as J. M. Mime) but abandoned it “in the absence of all inner need.”

“Beckett’s initial conception … was to have [a pair] of characters walking along Quadrants in all possible paths starting from O (a central origin) and returning to O. But in its final realization almost twenty years later, the mime begins and ends with the void, an empty quad, and travellers deflect their steps away from O.”

The discarded work was “intended as a mime for two players (son and father or mother) who are described as naked under their coats. The stage is plotted out in a square, the four corners of which (lettered A-D) are to be marked either by two boots and two hats or by four boots, recalling the boots and hat found onstage in Godot

Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...

;” the mid-points were lettered E-G, and the centre, O.

The idea goes back even further however, “indeed Quad may be regarded as the fulfilment onstage of the goal he had set himself in 1937 in the letter to Axel Kaun, the achieving of an entirely new means of expression through the elimination of language.”

Quad I

“Quad is based on a geometrical figure and on permutations of regular movements. First one, then two, then three, then four figures, dancers or mime artistes, dressed in coloured djellaba

Djellaba

Djellaba is a traditional long, loose-fitting outer robe with full sleeves worn in the Maghreb region of North Africa and in Arabic-speaking countries along the Mediterranean.Traditionally djellabas are made of wool in different shapes and colors though nowadays...

s (white, yellow, blue and red) appear one after another to scurry along the sides and across the diagonals of a square, shuffling in strict rhythm to a rapid percussion beat. Each figure then departs in the order in which he appeared, leaving another to recommence the sequence … Strikingly all of them avoid the centre which is clearly visible in the middle of the square.”

Movements and Stages

Stage	Series 1				Series 2				Series 3				Series 4
One	white	-	-	-	yellow	-	-	-	blue	-	-	-	red	-	-	-
Two	white	blue	-	-	yellow	white	-	-	blue	yellow	-	-	red	blue	-	-
Three	white	blue	red	-	yellow	white	red	-	blue	yellow	white	-	red	blue	yellow	-
Four	white	blue	red	yellow	yellow	white	red	blue	blue	yellow	white	red	red	blue	yellow	white
Five	-	blue	red	yellow	-	white	red	blue	-	yellow	white	red	-	blue	yellow	white
Six	-	-	red	yellow	-	-	red	blue	-	-	white	red	-	-	yellow	white

Courses

Course 1	AC	CB	BA	AD	DB	BC	CD	DA
Course 2	BA	AD	DB	BC	CD	DA	AC	CB
Course 3	CD	DA	AC	CB	BA	AD	DB	BC
Course 4	DB	BC	CD	DA	AC	CB	BA	AD

The four series of six stages each produce a total of twenty-four stages suggesting, as in Lessness, the measurement of time.

According to the script each character was to be unique in a number of ways. Apart from the colour of the outfit, they were to be “[a]s alike in build as possible. Short and slight for preference … Adolescents

Adolescence

Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...

 a possibility. Sex indifferent.” That said, each player’s footsteps were to be distinctive, each was to be accompanied by their own musical instrument and illuminated by a light, the same colour as their outfit. For technical reasons, in the original broadcast, white light was used. To help the performers cope with the rhythmic chaos “[t]hey wore headphones

Headphones

Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, held close to a user's ears and connected to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio, CD player or portable Media Player. They are also known as stereophones, headsets or, colloquially, cans. The in-ear...

 under their hoods, so they could hear the percussion beats.”

Most unusually there is an element of chance in this piece in that Beckett does not indicate how the footsteps should differ nor which instruments should be used other than they should be percussive (“say drum

Drum

The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments, which is technically classified as the membranophones. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with the player's hands, or with a...

, gong

Gong

A gong is an East and South East Asian musical percussion instrument that takes the form of a flat metal disc which is hit with a mallet....

, triangle

Triangle (instrument)

The triangle is an idiophone type of musical instrument in the percussion family. It is a bar of metal, usually steel but sometimes other metals like beryllium copper, bent into a triangle shape. The instrument is usually held by a loop of some form of thread or wire at the top curve...

, wood block

Wood block

A woodblock is essentially a small piece of slit drum made from a single piece of wood and used as a percussion instrument. It is struck with a stick, making a characteristically percussive sound....

”), he doesn’t even specify a required sequence for the colours. The four percussionists also have some freedom in how they play enabling the footsteps to be able to be heard on their own at intervals. Of course, as you would expect, the four instruments Beckett suggests have quite different timbre

Timbre

In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...

s.

It is hard not to think of the work of John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

 when considering this piece though the two men’s approach to work could hardly be different: Beckett argues that it is “the shape” that matters in his work whereas Cage evades conventional form in order to reveal “a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.” That said, it is not unimaginable that Beckett might have come up with a version of 4′33″ if Cage hadn’t thought of it first.

There are no cuts, just one fixed long take. Beckett had originally calculated its length at 25 minutes but, in reality, the whole set was completed in nine-an-a-half minutes.

Quad II

“Near the end of the taping, Beckett created what amounted to an unplanned second act for the play. When he saw the colour production of Quad rebroadcast on a black and white monitor, he decided instantly to create Quad II. [As with Film

Film (film)

Film is a film written by Samuel Beckett, his only screenplay. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset of Grove Press. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script followed thereafter...

] Beckett's printed text (in any language) was, however, never revised to acknowledge this remarkable revision of the work's fundamental structure. No printed version of the play bears the title of the production, and so no accurate version, one that includes Beckett's revisions, exists in print. Beckett's own videotape

Videotape

A videotape is a recording of images and sounds on to magnetic tape as opposed to film stock or random access digital media. Videotapes are also used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram...

d German production, then, remains the only ‘final’ text for Quad.”

The story goes that, watching technicians testing the image quality of Quad, the most hectic and raucous piece that Beckett ever wrote, for reception by monochrome receivers, and running the tape through in slow motion and in black and white, Beckett suddenly exclaimed: `My God, it's a hundred thousand years later!' Seeing the hectic bustle of the performance he had already recorded transformed into the slow, dim shuffle, suggested to Beckett a fast-forward to a time when everything will have nearly gone.

“The fast percussion beats were … removed and the only sounds that were heard were the slower, shuffling steps of the weary figures and, almost inaudibly, the tick of a metronome

Metronome

A metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks — settable in beats per minute. These ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse; some metronomes also include synchronized visual motion...

.” The performers now wore identical robes and moved at half the pace. The new section, called Quad II, lasts four minutes as it only allows for one series of movements, compared to the four in Quad I.

“The second version was a masterstroke, a second act to dramatize the entropy

Entropy

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...

 of the motion. And, since the figures always turn left, not only at the centre but at all the corners also, the pattern is that of the damned in the Inferno. Quad is indeed a sinister piece.”

The director Alan Schneider

Alan Schneider

Alan Schneider was an American theatre director and mentor responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights...

 wrote to Beckett (13th Nov 1981) after viewing the television programme several times: “much moved, especially by the slower section. Want to work on that as a stage piece with some of my students here – no audience – would you mind?” Beckett replied (20th Nov 1981): “Can’t see Quad on stage. But by all means have a go.” Later (6th Feb 1982) he made a qualifying remark: “Quad can’t work on stage. But no doubt interesting for students, gymnastically.” These are fascinating remarks considering the fact that Beckett takes no real advantage of the many televisual techniques available, no close-up

Close-up

In filmmaking, television production, still photography and the comic strip medium a close-up tightly frames a person or an object. Close-ups are one of the standard shots used regularly with medium shots and long shots . Close-ups display the most detail, but they do not include the broader scene...

s, freeze frames

Freeze frame shot

A freeze frame shot is used when one shot is printed in a single frame several times, in order to make an interesting illusion of a still photograph....

, pans, cuts, zooms, slow-motion

Slow motion

Slow motion is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down. It was invented by the Austrian priest August Musger....

 shots or split screens

Split screen (film)

In film and video production, split screen is the visible division of the screen, traditionally in half, but also in several simultaneous images, rupturing the illusion that the screen's frame is a seamless view of reality, similar to that of the human eye...

 – simply a fixed camera “far South of the circle, overlooking it” that might represent any member of a theatre-going audience.

Interpretation

“Modern works of art often call for prolonged continuous close attention if one is to appreciate them. The same is true of a gator

Alligator

An alligator is a crocodilian in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae. There are two extant alligator species: the American alligator and the Chinese alligator ....

 basking in the sun on a mud bank in a swamp

Swamp

A swamp is a wetland with some flooding of large areas of land by shallow bodies of water. A swamp generally has a large number of hammocks, or dry-land protrusions, covered by aquatic vegetation, or vegetation that tolerates periodical inundation. The two main types of swamp are "true" or swamp...

. Anything viewed makes demands.”

The building blocks of Quad can be found in a number of Beckett’s other works:

“In Play

Play (play)

Play is a one-act play by Samuel Beckett. It was written between 1962 and 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on 14 June 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany, directed by Deryk Mendel, with Nancy Illig , Sigfrid Pfeiffer and Gerhard Winter...

, there is a correlation between light and voice, and a da capo structure that forms an image of hell, but the voices of W1, W2 and M (an eternal triangle) do not follow a predictable sequence. In this respect, action and dialogue differs from that of Come and Go

Come and Go

Come and Go is a short play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in January 1965 and first performed at the Schillertheater, Berlin on 14 January 1966...

, where it is shaped by the mathematical sequence, a series of ritual movements: as one character leaves, another moves up into the vacant centre.” Both Come and Go and Quad trace shapes through highly patterned movements and interaction that mimic life through extreme abstraction. These works are the inner rhythms laid bare.” “Geometrical structures of light and darkness shape the stage settings of Ghost Trio

Ghost Trio (play)

Ghost Trio is a television play, written in English by Samuel Beckett. It was written in 1975, taped in October 1976 and the first broadcast was on BBC2 on 17 April 1977 as part of the Lively Arts programme Beckett himself entitled Shades. Donald McWhinnie directed with Ronald Pickup and Billie...

, and ...but the clouds...; while in Breath

Breath (play)

Breath is a notably short stage work by Samuel Beckett. An altered version was first included in Kenneth Tynan's revue Oh! Calcutta!, at the Eden Theatre in New York City on June 16, 1969. The UK premiere was at the Close Theatre Club in Glasgow in October 1969; this was the first performance of...

and Not I

Not I

Not I is a twenty-minute dramatic monologue written in 1972 by Samuel Beckett, translated as Pas Moi; premiere at the “Samuel Beckett Festival” by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, New York , directed by Alan Schneider, with Jessica Tandy and Henderson Forsythe .-Synopsis:Not I takes place...

the light is arithmetical, changing in time. Quad integrates both forms: the quad is set out geometrically, but the movements of the players defined arithmetically, with absolute precision. Behind the dramaticule is a metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 of coincidence, or meeting in time and space, and hence the ‘danger zone’ where this might happen.” Even “the “perpetual separation and reunion of Vladimir

Vladimir (Waiting for Godot)

Vladimir is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.- Personality :...

 and Estragon

Estragon

Estragon is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. His name is the French word for tarragon.- The impulsive misanthrope :...

” which has been described as “a choreography of the void, a search for stepping-stones to best approach or avoid the other”, can be seen to anticipate Quad, as can the fact that Act II covers the same ground as Act I in the same way that Quad II literally covers the same ground as Quad I.

Why are these four pacing so? Martin Esslin

Martin Esslin

Martin Julius Esslin OBE was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name...

 believes they “are clearly engaged in a quest for an Other.” He reads “the centre that the hooded wanderers have so fearfully to avoid is obviously the point at which real communication, a real ‘encounter,’ would be potentially possible but inevitably proves – by the very nature of existence itself – impossible.

Sidney Homan describes Quad’s world as a “faceless, emotionless one of the far future, a world where people are born, go through prescribed movements, fear non-being (E) even though their lives are meaningless, and then they disappear or die.” This raises a philosophical question, one the writer Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...

 tried to answer in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 120 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe; the English translation by Justin O'Brien followed in 1955....

: Face to face with the meaninglessness of existence, what keeps us from suicide

Suicide

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...

? What stops any of the four players from simply hurling themselves into the “danger zone”? To a large extent, Camus suggests that our instinct for life is much stronger than our reasons for suicide: "We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking." We instinctively avoid facing the full consequences of the meaningless nature of life, through what Camus calls an "act of eluding."

The following section from Camus’s essay could almost sum up both Quad I and Quad II:

[Quad I] "It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, streetcar

Tram

A tram is a passenger rail vehicle which runs on tracks along public urban streets and also sometimes on separate rights of way. It may also run between cities and/or towns , and/or partially grade separated even in the cities...

, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm-this path is easily followed most of the time.

[Quad II] But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ...Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness … What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening."

The ‘danger zone’ may not, of course, signify death but it would take an act of faith – or “an act of lucidity” – to find out for sure. When Sidney Homan was rehearsing his version of Quad, to learn more about the piece the players improvised, what one of the actors called “a real ending, something more than the final character’s just disappearing” where the last character about the leave the stage, halts, turns, removes her hood and then, as if being beckoned by the centre, hesitantly makes her way there where the lights fade down on her.

If recourse to Beckett’s own attitude is necessary, it is well documented that Beckett favoured the mere physicality of his work over interpretative readings. With Not I he stated explicitly that he was not “unduly concerned with intelligibility. [He wanted] “the piece to work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.” With Quad, there are no longer any ‘nasty words’ for that to be an issue. During filming Beckett “spoke to the SDR

Süddeutscher Rundfunk

The Süddeutscher Rundfunk was a German radio and television station operating in the northern part of the state of Baden-Württemberg. It existed from 1949 to 1998, when it was merged with the then Südwestfunk to form the Südwestrundfunk....

 cameraman

Cinematographer

A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...

, Jim Lewis about the difficulty that he now had in writing down any words without having the intense feeling that they would inevitably be lies.”

Rather than trying to make ‘sense’ of Quad, it is perhaps better to consider the ‘sensation’ caused by Quad. It presents us with the ‘meaning’ behind the words. The problem with meanings is that we’re used to having them wrapped up IN words. They are like masks behind expressionless masks. Quad exposes the mechanism underneath the actors’ actions; the clock’s face and hands have been removed and all we are left with are the exposed workings, which can be a thing of beauty in its own right, and, of course, makes perfect sense in itself.

“As Susan D. Brienza indicates, in … Quad the four characters rhythmically draw mandala

Mandala

Maṇḍala is a Sanskrit word that means "circle". In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point...

 pictures that reveal concentric

Concentric

Concentric objects share the same center, axis or origin with one inside the other. Circles, tubes, cylindrical shafts, disks, and spheres may be concentric to one another...

 circles and include four quadrants. The dancers’ counter-clockwise

Clockwise

Circular motion can occur in two possible directions. A clockwise motion is one that proceeds in the same direction as a clock's hands: from the top to the right, then down and then to the left, and back to the top...

 pacing evokes Jung’s

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

 patient’s leftward movement, which is equivalent to a progress towards the unconscious. They desperately attempt to achieve ‘centering’ and reinstate order and peace, to abolish the separation between the unconscious and the conscious mind.”

“The avoidance of the centre is clearly a metaphor capable of wide interpretation, as with Winnie’s mound in Happy Days

Happy Days (play)

Happy Days is a play in two acts, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. He began the play on 8 October 1960 and it was completed on 14 May 1961. Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title...

. The small empty square … could suggest the flight from self, the ‘I’ Beckett’s characters so carefully avoid … The deliberate avoidance of contact with each other, though present in the same square of light, is also a familiar theme in Beckett, whose characters frequently choose isolation as with Krapp

Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue"...

or the Listener in That Time

That Time

For the song "That Time" by Regina Spektor see Begin to HopeThat Time is a one-act play by Samuel Beckett, written in English between 8 June 1974 and August 1975...

.”

Eckart Voigts-Virchow presents an interesting – and amusing – comparison between Beckett’s play and the 1990s BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 children’s TV show Teletubbies

Teletubbies

Teletubbies is a BBC children's television series targeted at pre-school viewers and produced from 1997 to 2001 by Ragdoll Productions. It was created by Ragdoll's creative director Anne Wood CBE and Andrew Davenport, who wrote each of the show's 365 episodes. The programme's original narrator was...

:

“Whereas the Teletubbies have presumably only just started to acquire the apparatus of human articulation (“Eh-oh!”) and are trapped in their progress for hundreds of episodes by the requirements of serialization, Beckett’s hooded figures totally relinquish expressiveness beyond their coloured gowns, leitmotiv

Leitmotif

A leitmotif , sometimes written leit-motif, is a musical term , referring to a recurring theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical idea of idée fixe...

 percussion, and racecourse. They are defined by mere physical exertion. The Quad figures are probably an image of how the Teletubbies will behave when they are close to death and their belly monitors have long gone blank and become sightless windows.”

“That there is a pun in ‘quad’ and ‘quod’ (slang for gaol) can hardly have escaped Beckett. Since one of his Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 apartments overlooked the Santé Prison

La Santé Prison

La Santé Prison is a prison operated by the Ministry of Justice located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, France. It is one of the most famous prisons in France, with both VIP and high security wings....

, he must have been conscious of the rhythm of life as lived in a prison over a long period. With this in mind the players following their prescribed course of movements around a square could be seen as ‘doing time’ in the most literal sense of the term and exercising within the precise limits of the prison yard.”

Musical Interpretation

Pascal Dusapin

Pascal Dusapin

Pascal Dusapin , is a French composer born in Nancy. He is one of France's best-known living composers; his works have been performed worldwide....

 has invoked or cited Beckett for a long time without ever having set his work to music. Dusapin's entire œuvre has been inspired by Beckett, and his scores carry traces of his passage. Quad, for violin

Violin

The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....

 and ensemble, dedicated to Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

, one of the most renowned commentators on Beckett, begins with the exhaustion of possibilities, which is reminiscent of many of the writer's propositions.

In 2006, ANALOG arts received permission from the Beckett estate to stage Quad in a program of his short plays. Included in the ARTSaha!

ARTSaha!

ARTSaha! is Omaha's new music festival. Held in the late summer, it is an annual showcase of contemporary music and art that stresses interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. ARTSaha! is produced by ANALOG arts ensemble, a non-profit global collective of artists.-History:ARTSaha! was...

 new music festival, Quad was programmed because of its strong affinity with the music of contemporary composers like John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

 and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

.

External links

• Quad I video (Media Art Net)
• Quat - A dance performance based on Quad (Antwerp 1997), recreated in Glasgow, Scotland for Theatre Cryptic at the Beckett Time Festival as a multimedia production for dancers, sound, video & graphics.
• Quad, as performed by iRobot Create - A robotic version of Quad I, directed by Matt Gray and produced by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at the CMU, where the process of mechanizing humans is circumvented by starting with machines ab initio.