Reviews today include the International Dance Festival at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Phaedra by Frank McGuinness in the Donmar Warehouse, London, Janis Ian in Vicar Street, Dublin, Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins at The Village, Dublin and The Cardigans at the Ambassador, Dublin
International Dance Festival: The Rite of Spring and Folding
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Christine Madden
East and West coalesce into a new direction in the Shen Wei Dance Arts company. Born in China, living in New York, Shen Wei's interest in genres including Chinese opera, visual art, calligraphy and contemporary dance, bring to bear on his creative output.
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring perennially fascinates choreographers. Nevertheless, Shen's treatment is surprising, as he divests it of its feral narrative into an abstract, minimalistic sketch with bare set design, lines criss-crossing the chalky stage at various angles, monochrome costumes, detached choreographic language. Even Stravinsky's orchestral score is reduced to four-handed piano adaptation.
With the map of lines across the floor, it seems like the dancers navigate a stage microcosm of a Manhattan in restless search of themselves. The result is a fascinating but dispassionate work in which dancers flow, twist and loop like calligraphic ciphers - mesmerising but hard to warm to.
Shen's second piece, Folding, provided dramatic contrast. In blazing red skirts, sculpted and trailing, and Nefertiti-like headgear, dancers oozed their roles in viscous movement to an ethereal score by John Taverner. The chiming bells over the melancholy bass and nervous violins underscored the surreal, dreamlike feel of the piece that never strayed too far from a lurking sense of menace. Arching back or curling forwards, solo or in groups, or paired indistinguishably like mating amphibians, dancers gaze dispassionately at the sky or ground or straight ahead in a trance. When Shen separates himself from the rest, finally spent across the floor, the red-robed dancers turn their backs to face upstage while those clad in black glide across the stage with low, even steps and dissolve into the growing gloom.
The feeling throughout is slightly eerie and voyeuristic, as though the audience is unwittingly party to a religious exercise, and pathos combines with disquiet as we witness Shen's isolation.
Although both are visually extraordinary, the second piece is in particular a visual experience like none other; nevertheless, the abstraction of the works feels like detachment. You do not warm to them so much as experience and admire them. Shen's style is hypnotic, rich and promising; one gets the sense that the best is yet to come from this talented choreographer.
Phaedra by Frank McGuinness, after Racine
Donmar Warehouse, London
Bernard Adams
The gods of theatrical havoc finally relented and let the official first night of Phaedra take place - without incident, but 10 days behind schedule. Cast illness and other vicissitudes were forgotten as a brand new Hippolytus, young Ben Meyjes, fitted in very well with director Tom Cairns's compactly designed, finely-acted interpretation of the play.
Frank McGuinness has used a plain, muscular, dignified prose in his new text. There are a few Irish cadences - relished by the two Celtic voices in the cast, Marcella Plunkett (a pretty, no-pushover Aricia) and Sean Campion (a warm Theramenes).
Tom Cairns's production is straightforward, his set uncluttered: the floor is stone and sand; a flame burns in a corner, a gauze screen carries images of a boiling sea. The characters are clad in a discreet amalgam of modern and ancient dress. The audience is given a chance to hear - undistracted - what Racine/ McGuinness have to say.
This where some doubts creep in. The diction of the 17th-century French original is poetic, high-flown, which may suit Phaedra's extravagant emotions better than McGuinness's plain-speaking. When, early on, Phaedra (Clare Higgins) curls up in foetal position and confesses here dreadful secret - that she loves her stepson, Hippolytus - her continuing torrents of compulsive self-pity began to provoke in this reviewer an unpardonable why don't you pull yourself together? reaction.
Clare Higgins is a fine actress: for example her savage ingratitude toward her too-faithful servant Oenon (Linda Bassett, intense) is chilling. But the difficulty is that Racine makes Phaedra come on already mad with guilt at her incestuous longings; the text may just not allow the actor the slow build of emotion which might work better for 21st-century audiences.
The end, nevertheless, is moving: Phaedra looks death in the face, alone - abandoned by everyone, even her husband Theseus (Michael Feast, wily and tough but strangely credulous). As for Hippolytus, Ben Meyjes plays him with passion and integrity, even if he is still a little youthful for the role.
Janis Ian
Vicar Street, Dublin
Siobhán Long
Okay let's get the confession out of the way. There was a time when this writer considered it a homage to christen a spunky pet pup after "Jesse" the hero so longingly recalled by Janis Ian. As far as this pre-teen was concerned, it was a reverential gesture without compare.
Ian chose to wrap up her poised solo performance with this maudlin ode to lost love. Slowing the song's pace to downright funereal, Ian chose to wring every last droplet of emotion from what just might be her second-best tale of woe. She relates to her audience with the calm of the practised performer. She sidles vintage and shiny new songs into her repertoire, indulging here, challenging there, her ears surprisingly finely attuned to life's inherent comedy.
She revelled in the bawdy blues-iness of Fly Too High, playfully tinkering with its melody line while she sized up her audience. Her voice is surprisingly fresh, occasionally struggling to reach the higher octaves, but essentially shot through with that same vulnerability that marked At Seventeen apart as the perfect soundtrack to every angst-ridden teenager's journey.
And yes, she did sing it, and no, she didn't save it for the encore. These days it falters on the brink of mawkishness, light years away from the clawing uncertainty of youth. Then again, maybe its relevance was wasted on an audience whose collective memory of that age of uncertainty might have dimmed in the intervening, eh, decades.
With her latest album, Folk Is The New Black marking a return to fine songwriting form, Ian had no shortage of sparkly new material to joust with. The witty My Autobiography gave vent to her keen sense of irony, and Joy was a steely reminder of the passage of time, both songs evidence of Ian's appetite for pushing the envelope, even if it is, these days, ever so gently.
Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins
The Village, Dublin
Peter Crawley
Jenny Lewis stands before us, pretty as a doll, in a long, black-lace gown that suggests high mourning. Were it not for her flame-red fringe she could pass for Morticia Adams' younger sister. In fact, she has stiff competition for this role in the shape of Leigh Watson (statuesque and raven-haired) and Chandra Watson (raven-haired and statuesque); identical twins in evening gowns and cowboy boots.
This striking appearance is hardly accidental - Lewis, a former child actor and adopted Los Angeleno, certainly knows how to put on a show - and the ensuing night of sumptuously crepuscular country follows a planned theme: "American Gothic".
"Run devil, run," the trio sings a cappella, in a slow procession toward their microphones. With harmonies as lilting and entrancing as these, however, the devil would be better advised to grab a beer and find a seat.
Although Lewis fronts LA indie darlings Rilo Kiley, her solo side-project is a better display of her strengths. With its alluring whisper and fragile upper register, her voice suggests vulnerability, but her sparse guitar figures and lyrical twists feel more armed and dangerous. Happy, for instance, a ballad of romantic delusion, is seductively eerie; pedal steel guitar drifting through its verses like a watching phantom.
Appealing as much to indie hipsters as country die-hards, Lewis adopts a Grand Ol' Opry formality - such as dressing up for the stage and being polite - while smuggling the dress-down, be-impolite ethos of indie music into her lyrics. This combination works best in a spare and archly self-aware Rabbit Fur Coat, performed in a mesmerising solo. Following with Rise up with Fists, the honky-tonk stomp of Jack Killed Mom, then the Watsons' divine harmonies on Born Secular - part Gospel, part Doo Wop - each successive song is so good the gig becomes almost unbearable.
None of this is tremendously reassuring news for the guys in Rilo Kiley. As Lewis and the Watsons blow us goodbye kisses, there's never been a better argument to keep it country.
The Cardigans
Ambassador, Dublin
Tony Clayton-Lea
It isn't often that rock or pop bands have a conundrum at their core, but the Cardigans have proven that they co-exist with a mystery as big as the Third Secret of Fatima: how does a successful pop/rock band shift creative thrust from fifth-gear flouncy types to second-gear reflective characters without losing the fan base that made them successful in the first place?
In theory, the answer is quite simple: they don't. In practice, the answer is less obvious: the band try the best they can to bridge the gap between the Top 20 hit single material (Lovefool, My Favourite Game, Erase/Rewind) and the creative about-face songs that barely scrape the charts (You're the Storm reached number 74 in the UK singles charts three years ago - the only "hit" from their fan-shredding but utterly superb album, Long Gone Before Midnight).
It's a tight squeeze between being a band popular enough to fill a venue this size and being the band that perhaps you really, really want to be, but the Cardigans just about manage to pull off the trick by being simultaneously smart, adventurous, self-indulgent and generous. It doesn't always work - some of the crowd-pleasing material drifts into borderline musical histrionics, and the sense that these moments are a last-gasp attempt at holding onto fans of the band's most commercially popular albums to date (1996's First Band on the Moon, 1998's Gran Turismo) is apparent.
The shifts in mood always arrive in the nick of time; songs such as You're the Storm, For What it's Worth, And Then You Kissed Me, Don't Blame Your Daughter (Diamonds), and Communication spearhead a different kind of Cardigans that appear to be directed in the main by lead singer Nina Persson (who tonight, incidentally, looks as if she has been poured into the world's tightest basque/jeans/boots combo).
Whether the band decides to stay in one creative mode or the other - or whether Persson's requirement for self-expression dictates a solo route, akin to her 2001 album, A Camp - remains to be seen. For the moment, the dichotomy works, a conundrum not solved but accepted and lived with.
