Irish Times writers review a selection of events in Dublin and Belfast.
Belfast Festival: Timon of Athens, Waterfront Studio
It is not difficult to understand why Cardboard Citizens have selected one of Shakespeare's least loved, most incomplete and most infrequently performed plays to co-produce as part of the RSC's marathon Complete Works Festival.
Having previously reshaped Pericles as a parable for asylum seekers, the company, which works with homeless and displaced persons and refugees, brings poignant real-life experience to its adaptation of the tale of the wealthy Athenian, who turns his back on his money and his flatterers and retreats to the wild, where he gradually loses mind and spirit. His is a transformation from philanthropist to misanthropist, from a world of getting and spending to a world of total denial - no wonder Karl Marx called it his favourite Shakespeare!
Picking up on the ancient equivalent of a motivational training theme, director/adaptor Adrian Jackson sets the first half in an off-the-wall management conference, for which members of the audience sign up on arrival in the foyer.
Power point presentation and flip charts are used somewhat tediously as the means of delivering the text, with narrative clarity taking second place to the conceit itself. Actors double up, right, left and centre and, as Timon's sanity disintegrates, the character is played by three actors - a clever indication that, in the homeless constituency, there are many Timons.
Of the three, Simeon Moore is by far the most engaging, bringing vocal strength, truth and beauty to the verse. Charlie Folorunsho as the churlish philosopher Apemantus is also a compelling presence, whose sharp delivery drives the storyline forward. Cardboard Citizens are a spirited bunch, who put body and soul into what they do on stage, but one longs for a greater sense of comprehension and closure at the end of a long three-hour performance. - Jane Coyle
Ends today
Robinson, Johnson, Roe Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Tom Johnson - Talking. Failing. Galileo. Bedtime Stories
If you were to try to place the composer Tom Johnson on some sort of creative spectrum, the list of essential bedfellows would be quite an extraordinary one.
It would obviously include his teacher Morton Feldman, and guiding light John Cage. But it would also feature the strange Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer (who invented a 12-tone system around the same time as Schoenberg, declared that "music and mathematics are of one and the same stamp!", and poured out Zwölftonspiele of extreme abstraction), the 19th-century Italian Pietro Raimondo (who wrote a comic opera and a tragic opera that could be performed simultaneously as well as separately), and the American individualist Conlon Nancarrow (who spent most of his life writing music of extraordinary rhythmic intricacy for player pianos).
The spectrum would embrace the principles of change ringing, and there would be space, too, for those composers who provided humorous pieces for the celebrated Hoffnung Music Festivals in London in the 1950s. For reasons both musical and non-musical it would also have to include Samuel Beckett and the late, lamented, boundary-breaking, iconoclastic Scottish poet and performer extraordinaire, Ivor Cutler.
Johnson is one of those rare composers who knows how to reach his listeners' funny-bones. He does it with a dry wit and a sure grasp of the implications of unfolding of patterns. And the playing out of inevitable patterns is at the heart of his work, too, when there's not a hint of a smile about.
Wednesday's performances at the Project Arts Centre, a promotion by Siobhán Cleary's Ireland Promoting New Music, included an Australian production of the 1985 radio piece, Talking (its two characters invert what you might expect, favouring conversational lubricant at the expense of communication, to create a virtual maze of connected but not quite meaningful phrases), the slippery Everest of Failing (1975), a solo that requires a talking double bassist to fail in order to succeed (Malachy Robinson), and Bedtime Stories (1985), music amusingly wrapped in matching words (or is it the other way around?) for storytelling clarinettist (Paul Roe).
Robinson and Roe handled their tasks with touches of the almost inevitable reticence that professional musicians show when asked to talk within a piece. But the performances still delivered what the pieces needed. Johnson himself performed his Galileo, a work in celebration of the law of the pendulum, which has been evolving since 2000. The piece, for which Johnson has created a new instrument, with five brass bars suspended from pendulums of closely-gauged ratios, is a typically Johnsonian, minimalist epic.
Over 40-plus minutes it presents a rigorous exploration of numbers, rhythms and patterns within a carefully varied but narrowly-defined colouristic palette that is tinged by minute doses of the Doppler Effect. It's at once an engrossing, hypnotic chart, and an implacable, unspoken lecture on the nature of music and nature itself. - Michael Dervan
Sufjan Stevens, Olympia, Dublin
Wearing large, multicoloured wings and dark, feathered masks, Sufjan Stevens and his nine-piece band looked like some sort of eerie butterfly cult. Inflatable Superman and Santa Claus dolls were scattered around the stage, and at the centre of it all, a miniature rooster sat on a velvet cushion. "This is surreal," one guy in the audience muttered as Stevens adjusted his wings and turned to the crowd: "We just flew in yesterday."
Lively kaleidoscopic visuals fused into hazy images of sunshine, clouds and a small boy playing with a kite as Stevens moved between piano, guitar and banjo. The five-member brass accompaniment played in animated, unruly blasts, which mixed brilliantly with Steven's sweet, untainted voice. Quiet, introverted moments often descended into chaotic guitar, drums and gunshot piano. "This is for all the Superman fans," Stevens said, throwing inflatable Superman dolls into the crowd. Later, during a song about Stevens's worst Christmas, inflatable Santa Clauses descended upon the audience.
Despite all the colour and novelty of the show, however, the music's raw, somewhat innocent sound prevailed. This was brought out by lonesome piano and Stevens's high, unblemished voice, while his lyrics evoked a more forlorn, reflective tone: "His father was a drinker and his mother cried in bed."
Stevens sang favourites The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders, John Wayne Gacy JR and, keeping with the theme of flying, an excellent new song about a snowbird. Chicago was one of the show's strongest moments, the crowd singing along as Stevens repeated: "I made a lot of mistakes".
Telling humorous anecdotes about his childhood, Stevens described how his father saw aliens "after smoking too much pot"; being woken up late at night by his parents to be told about "family yoga"; how his father got carried away burning rubbish in their back yard. While these stories rambled at moments, ultimately they gave a curious insight into the kooky, dreamlike and quietly distorted world of Stevens's music. Returning for an encore, they finished a powerful performance with one of their best tracks, Jacksonville, but left the wings backstage. - Sorcha Hamilton
Cork City Ballet: Ballet Spectacular. The Helix, Dublin
Being a ballet lover in Ireland presents a quandary that was heightened during Cork City Ballet's Ballet Spectacular. The overall standard of dancing was high, but other production decisions proved disappointing.
The two-part programme featured short dance excerpts and the second act of La Bayadere, a ballet that was created by French choreographer Marius Petipa and first performed at the Maryinsky Theater in St Petersburg in 1877.
Guest principal dancers Eun Sun Jun, from the Royal Swedish Ballet, and Dragos Mihalcea, of the Dutch National Ballet, performed the lead roles and helped raise the overall standard. Known as the Kingdom of the Shades, this is largely a showcase for the corps, and in this version dancers descended from a ramp in single file, their legs reaching skyward in arabesques, row after row of them filling the stage. Moving in constant unison, they created an ethereal scene, as soloists Chika Temma and Andrea Fernandez danced with stoicism. Irish ballerina Monica Loughman combined brittle pointe work with a fluid upper body.
But it was hard to focus on just how well everything was going in the second act while trying to comprehend why so many short excerpts were pieced together in the first half, including a portion of George Balanchine's Who Cares? Balanchine was so meticulous about how his ballets were performed that a trust was set up to hold them in copyright and control the quality of performances.
Eun and Mihalcea were upbeat and carefree dancing to George Gershwin's The Man I Love, just one of the 16 songs from the ballet, and Eun practically glowed in her buttery yellow costume while Mihalcea danced with reassuring grace. While it was welcome to see Balanchine's choreography performed in Ireland, that enjoyment was clouded with unease.
Temma and Victor Povavarov excelled in the Don Quixote pas de deux, and guest artist Leighton Morrison was a welcome addition throughout the evening. - Christie Taylor
Leonard, Collins, OSC/Montgomery, NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Violin Concerto No 4. Piano Concerto in C K467. Symphony No 41 (Jupiter)
In the first of three Mozart anniversary concerts with conductor Kenneth Montgomery, the Orchestra of St Cecilia illustrated the growing fashion for placing modern instruments at the service of historically informed interpretation.
Montgomery was clearly less concerned with strictly directing the music than with optimising performance potential. Frequently entrusting the time-keeping to the players themselves, he encouraged them to respond to the music and to each other.
This informal approach may have made for some loose coordination at times, but it ensured that there could be nothing drab or routine about the execution. The OSC's constitution and layout were not without disadvantages. From their raised position, the oboes could be altogether too vivid to integrate with the dozen or so strings.
And with the second violins and violas positioned on the right - thus projecting their sound away from most of the audience - the string balance could verge on the hollow.At their best, however, the balances resulted in lively, ear- opening effects: silky chording from the upper strings in the andante of the Violin Concerto K218, a cheery fife-and-drum chorus from the winds in the first movement of the Piano Concerto K467, and a well-disposed tutti in the minuet of the Jupiter Symphony K551.
Catherine Leonard was an agreeable and sweet-toned soloist in the Violin Concerto, sustaining a charming and silvery legato that gave way to more pointed textures only in the finale.Clearly in his element in the Piano Concerto, soloist Finghin Collins sat facing the audience at a lidless instrument, surrounded on three sides by the orchestra.
In this historical stage formation, the piano seemed to enjoy easier conversation with the winds in particular, and the solo passage work had a driving rather than a merely decorating effect. - Andrew Johnstone.
