A selection of review by Irish Times writers.
International Dance Festival Ireland
Prone
Project, Dublin
By Christine Madden
In John Jasperse's new work, Prone, the audience also serves as prop, obstacle for the dancers and part of the set design and the piece itself. Prone begins with a warning: that audience members undergo a slight risk to life and limb. The caveat sets spectators up from the outset to expect the unexpected; it plants a sense of anticipation and excitement.
While half the audience sits in chairs lining either side of the open, emptied hall of Project Upstairs, the other half lies on plastic inflatable mattresses in six rows perpendicular to the seats. Technicians and musicians inhabit one end of the space; rows of lights - some sheltered on the floor, with bulbs, draped with white cloth, dangling from the ceiling - punctuate the other. Dancers in grey hoodies and shorts enter and bat inflated plastic bags like balloons across the landscape of audience bodies. Piling the bag-balloons on the other end of the space, the dancers ooze into the centre - balancing and climbing their way across the rows, knitting themselves in and out of their supine spectators.
The sound design, with its indefinable groans, whispers and wheezing, underscores the futuristic, moonscape atmosphere. Spectators can watch the action directly or follow it on the wonky mirrors placed overhead, which reflect the action in a distorted image - the lights with draped cloth, for example, become a row of white poppies in their reflection.
Apart from never knowing when next a dancer will approach and curve around or thud by, the viewers' sense of trepidation is augmented by further prop use - a dancer puts on one of the hanging lights as a skirt and illuminates the stage as a will o' the wisp; an extra inflatable element rises up unexpectedly between the legs of the supine audience members, eliciting giggles. The piece hits so many different buttons. It not only explores perspective but also vulnerability, as the audience members warily wonder what will come at them next. It also includes them in the performance, in order to blend a profound physical awareness with the visual appreciation of the experience. Jasperse's creativity and mischievous choreographic vision make this a piece the audience can enjoy and appreciate as a full-body, five-senses experience.
Seosamh Ó Neachtain, Tamango
Crawdaddy, Dublin
By Christine Madden
As the international session crackles to life in a staccato of footwork, the programme's title, Stepping Out, reveals itself to be as understated as Seosamh Ó Neachtain's almost shy performance style. With the accompaniment of accordionist Mairtín O'Connor, fiddler Cathal Hayden and guitarist Sheamie O'Dowd on Ó Neachtain's side, and Haitian percussionist "Bonga" Gaston Jean-Baptiste and Italian trumpeter Fabio Morgera on Tamango's, the two dancers leave the audience and themselves breathless after a programme of virtuoso footwork.
Ó Neachtain and Tamango's week-long residency culminated in a collaborative presentation of foot fireworks, combining traditional Irish, jazz, tap and world music and dance styles. Born in French Guiana, Tamango now works out of New York. His style mixes his South American cultural background with the razzmatazz of US showmanship as he rattles through intricate tap steps and presents himself wholly, gleefully and confidently to his admiring audience. In contrast, Ó Neachtain works the stage diffidently, always staring down in concentration, his upper body nevertheless loose and open as his scuffed shoes pulse off the floor.
With only a week, the dancers presumably had little time to marry their styles. Only at the beginning and the end did both dancers occupy the tiny stage together in an impressive fusion performance that played up both the uniqueness and the parallels between both ethnic dance techniques. The bulk of the programme featured the two dancers individually, their alternating performances a dialogue expressed not in words but in physical exhilaration.
Tamango vibrated down the stage in a staccato that could be heard but not seen, flicking his feet across the floorboards like paintbrushes, bending them at the ankle and smacking them sideways across the floor. Ó Neachtain often looked like he was dancing under a strobe light, his feet like playful birds at the floor. He almost hovers, and you wonder if he might be able to dance across water - except it wouldn't make the right sound. His performance seemed an inward, personal experience, with the audience as awestruck voyeurs, whereas Tamango revelled in the attention, an enthusiastic host offering a sumptuous repast of dance. Their feet providing percussive punctuation, the two regaled the whooping, clapping audience with frequent examples of their complementary talents and styles.
Christine Madden looks back over the dance festival in tomorrow's arts page
Eugene Onegin: The Roadshow
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray
By Peter Crawley
It's a brave and wilfully esoteric move to adapt Aleksandr Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin for the stage. Almost as brave and esoteric as adapting Aleksandr Pushkin's life for the stage. But to do both simultaneously, shuffling the Byronic elegance of Onegin's verse into the historical scrappiness of Pushkin's biography, is pushing it.
To then shoehorn 19th-century Russia into the pop art framework of a "roadshow" - a This is Your Life-style gameshow - is simply asking for trouble.
Immersed in the politics of poetry, the poetry of politics, and scenes of exile and seduction and treason and creation, it seems odd that director Martin Murphy couldn't have talked writer Martin Murphy out of some of his more dizzying ideas, if only for the sake of the cast: Séamus Moran, Aoife Duffin, Colin O'Donaghue, Lizzy Quinn and - hello again - Martin Murphy.
Despite the best efforts and unwavering conviction of this accomplished cast, Something Different Theatre never quite gets these two stories to fuse.
At its best, Murphy's play taps directly into Pushkin's Russia: a crucible of revolution and romanticism, where art wasn't just close to life, art was life. At such moments it revels in a society where even palace guards secretly belong to poetry groups, where liberty finds its truest expression in the form of a stanza and criticism is best met with a pistol shot.
But, like Marcus Costello's impressive set - a hanging construction of brass rings and silver chains that outlines a Russian dome - the play's ornate structure becomes shaky when people have to inhabit it.
There is no clear delineation in performance style to signal when we are watching a stripped-down rendering of Onegin or an exhaustive bio of Pushkin. Murphy may enjoy the challenge of that factual-fictional blur, but, when the subject is obscure enough to begin with, the plots tend to clash, compete and ultimately bewilder.
To their great credit, the performers do seem to know what's going on. Moran is never less than engaging as the capricious Pushkin, while Aoife Duffin remains energetic and arresting across multiple roles. With such talents at their disposal, it must have been tempting to bite off so much. It's just a shame about the chewing.
Until May 13
Tönz, Gustafsson, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
By Michael Dungan
Brahms - Tragic Overture. Krzysztof Meyer - Double Concerto. Brahms - Symphony No 4.
The classic, potted summary of Brahms is that he was a composer of retro-looking, classical convictions, working at a time when his 19th-century contemporaries and immediate predecessors were fully-fledged Romantics. Avoiding, for example, the poetic titles that Schumann and Liszt often gave their pieces, Brahms stuck to generic terms such as symphony and intermezzo. He preferred that his music speak for itself.
While this aligned him with Mozart, Haydn and the 18th century, the ambivalence of Brahms was that his musical language belonged to the Romantic era in which he lived.
Walking the tight-rope of this ambivalence was the special achievement of principal conductor Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra inthe penultimate of their five-concert Brahmsfest. Economic in style and vision, Markson rarely overstates, and his trademark selfless direction, - which makes him and his players a conduit for the composer - proved ideal for the Fourth Symphony's quintessentially Brahmsian mix of classical design and pure, unlabelled emotional impact.
From the outset the orchestra - above all, the violins - demonstrated that they were in fine form, as also in the Tragic Overture, tight in ensemble and alive and responsive to Markson.
The programme also included the world premiere of Krzysztof Meyer's Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, commissioned by RTÉ. Meyer was on hand to speak before the concert and to acknowledge the enthusiastic response of the audience at the end of the performance. I couldn't help but have a more reserved reaction. While Meyer describes it as a "traditional concerto", the traditional ingredient of strong contrast was markedly diminished by an overwhelming sense of a single, rather despairing mood evoked to excess with only mild changes of tempo between movements. While there were plenty of appealing features and touches, listening gradually became hard work. The solo lines are almost relentless: you felt a bit like the silent participant in a conversation with two others trying to outdo each other.
That said, the playing of violinist Stefan Tönz and cellist Jan-Erik Gustafsson was powerful, almost persuasive, and a promising foretaste of their tackling of the Brahms Double Concerto in the final concert.
The Fiery Furnaces
Whelan's, Dublin
By Davin O'Dwyer
Brooklyn-based brother and sister act the Fiery Furnaces are often compared with the White Stripes, but it's a somewhat misleading observation. Jack and Meg White aren't siblings, for a start, and, while there are occasional similarities in the two bands' sound, the White Stripes would never be as wilfully eclectic and experimental as Eleanor and Matt Friedberger. Any band that records a concept album with their grandmother, as the Friedbergers did with 2005's Rehearsing My Choir, isn't going to be troubling the upper reaches of the charts any time soon. For the Fiery Furnaces, audience expectations are something to be played with rather than met.
They certainly did that with this performance, a frenetic, relentless punk masterclass that reached fever pitch inside the first 30 seconds and never let up. Eleanor Friedberger is astonishingly like a young Patti Smith, all furious energy and frantic vocals. Matt's guitar was equally angry, while Jason Lowenstein (formerly of Sebadoh) on bass and Bob D'Amico on drums provided an incessant cacophony.
However, the pianos and keyboards that underpin their recorded music were absent, depriving the songs of much of their character. Many tunes were radically reinvented versions of the originals, such as a virtually unrecognisable Leaky Tunnel from their first album, Gallowsbird's Bark. Even the material from new album Bitter Tea was given a harder rock edge. The punk makeover certainly made for a powerful, enthralling performance, but it perhaps didn't do all of their material justice. Replacing the rich variety and eclecticism of their albums with a one-note force-of-nature energy is, however, to be expected from the most challenging band in rock. Don't be surprised if their next tour sees the Friedbergers doing flamenco covers of their back catalogue.
