Reviews from the Dublin Fringe Festival
Revolution
Round Room, Mansion House
Christine Madden
Rarely has a title better fit a production than in the case of this new hybrid contemporary/trad piece by Cindy Cummings for Siamsa Tíre. The show represents both evolution and revolution as a new beginning for dance development.
With the most effective, focused and directed multimedia element in a dance piece I've ever seen by an Irish company, the dancers convene under a multi-coloured, spangled dome ceiling of the Round Room (the space of which, unfortunately, they don't use to full effect) as images first of edgy urban, then of idyllic rural Ireland flash across monolithic stretched canvases.
They weave in and out of these, and each other, while tapping out their traditional rhythms in their rigid style to street sounds, bird twittering and ululating flute.
The expression ground-breaking best describes this performance, which will hopefully open the field for further innovation and experimentation in the partnering of these two strands of dance, and its expression of 21st-century Ireland.
Bang on a Can All-Stars
O'Reilly Theatre
Michael Dervan
New York's Bang on a Can All-Stars opened with Thurston Moore's rock-flavoured, rib-shaking Stroking Piece #1. They followed it with the slow sentimental, downward scales of the final movement of Somei Satoh's Shu (Spells), which built up in volume so that, like the opening work, it substituted in-your-face impact for content in the way flavour-enhancer increases the appeal of tasteless food.
Things improved in the more subtly- drawn moods of Martin Bresnick's Kafka-inspired The Bucket Rider and BE JUST!, and the group members seemed to get fully into their stride for Donnacha Dennehy's funkily driven Streetwalker, a piece that decidedly wants to explore and expand what's between the cracks, and does so on the lines of the Blakean proverb, "Enough! or Too much".
Louis Andriessen's free-pitched, rhythmically tight "symfonic movement for any loud sounding group of instruments," Workers' Union, brought the concert to a riveting close.
