Irish Times writers review Westlife at the Point Depot, the Sugababes at the Olympia, Catherine Leonard at the Helix, Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross and Nick Miller at the Fenton Gallery in Cork, Once at the Samuel Beckett Theatre and Between You & Me at the Project in Dublin.
Westlife
Point Theatre, Dublin
Kevin Courtney
One of its heads has recently been cut off, but the four-headed hydra that is Westlife lumbers on, voraciously eating up the adulation of every teenage girl in its path. There's another few thousand of them packed into the Point, ready to sacrifice themselves before the beast and, judging by their screams, the gods of teenypop must surely be appeased. By the time Westlife end with their version of Mandy, departed member Bryan McFadden is already a distant memory.
This is the second of Westlife's 10 nights at Dublin's Point Theatre, and is a pointed show of unity in the aftermath of McFadden's departure. Having sold an obscene amount of records, and even challenged The Beatles' chart record, Westlife aren't about to close up shop just because one of its staff has quit. Besides, with one less stool to put onstage, this latest tour might even save money. "Westlife are unbreakable!" announces the one named (I think) Nicky. Just like those well-used stools, I'd imagine.
Happily, the foursome don't spend much of the gig sitting on their assets, but also do some wooden dance routines which must have been learnt from old episodes of Morecambe and Wise.
God bless 'em, they can't dance their way out of a sweet bag, but at least they can sing while simultaneously smiling and waving to the fans. They do Flying Without Wings, Swear It All Over Again and a slow version of Uptown Girl before jumping around for a cheesy medley of The Beatles, Wham, the Friends theme and the Blues Brothers' tune. The backing band is slick, competent and utterly plastic, although special mention must be made of those omnipresent chimes. They must go through those quicker than the stools.
A giant walkway is lowered to allow the lads to get nearer to the fans at the back of the venue, and one lucky girl (Linda from Tallaght) gets to share a couch with the lads while they sing My Love. Awww. I'd love to say it's money for old (skipping) rope, but who's gonna hear me over the adoring screams?
Sugababes
Olympia, Dublin
John Lane
Bristling with stlye and attitude, the Sugababes are a great example of what's best about pop at the moment. In their music, melancholy and those other, less packagable aspects of love and life have usurped the bubblegum boy-girl idylls that pervade the shallower waters of pop. Almost contemptuous of mushy love, their music is dark, edgy and very smart.
And to see the three girls stride onstage while a backing band of strapping session musicians belted out the riff from Led Zepplin's Kashmir seemed to confirm their credentials as musicians with something interesting to say. The opener highlighted their rock credentials and the theme continued with a very heavy take on their breakthrough single Freak Like Me, the hit that introduced the perpetually smiling Heidi as the new addition to the band, joining the surlier visages of Keisha and Mutya.
It may seem trite to be mentioning the group's countenances but the fact is, their perceived petulance, their reputation as "difficult", has become an inescapable part of the group's public identity.
Onstage however, the vibes were all positive, the three sounded fantastic and looked great. Yet, as the set progressed, it began to dawn that any rough edges which might have emerged in the proving ground of a live setting had been smoothed out by a well-rehearsed stage manner.
Musically, the Sugababes are about as "grown-up" as pop gets, yet as performers, it seems the girls have yet to leave their teeny-bopper personae behind. Each song had it's own mediocre choreography, which the girls performed with all the vigour of sleepwalkers; sidelong glances betrayed a shortage of confidence; cheesy smiles and cutsey waving to sections of the crowd undermined the aloofness with which true stars wow their audience.
In the end, the set, taken mostly from their last album Three, sounded great but was compromised by this sense of a by-the-numbers approach. Well-rehearsed might be professional, but it has the effect of obscuring the trio's true personalities, which if the rumours are to believed, would be something to behold.
Catherine Leonard,
Owen Mahony Hall,
The Helix, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Lutoslawski - Partita
Elgar - Sonata
Beethoven - Kreutzer Sonata
The 1918 Violin Sonata by Elgar is not a work that Irish violinists have ever taken up in great numbers, and mostly it has been presented in Ireland by visiting performers. Catherine Leonard has recently added it to her repertoire, and played it in Dublin for the first time at The Helix on Wednesday.
The sonata is one of four pieces that Elgar worked on at around the same time. The Cello Concerto is the only one of the group to have become well known, the chamber works - the others being his String Quartet and his Piano Quintet - languish in relative obscurity.
The writing in the sonata is uneven. Leonard and her partner at the piano, Charles Owen, made much of the work's fierily impassioned passages, but weren't quite able to hide the flaws when Elgar painted the moments of quiet lyricism too thinly. Perhaps in a more sympathetic setting than the sparsely-filled Mahony Hall, the salon-music atmosphere of the central Romance might have communicated more persuasively.
There were no communication problems in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, where the virtuosic assertiveness of the writing and the free give-and-take between violin and piano as equals were alertly handled.
The best playing of the evening, however, came in the opening work, the Partita which Lutoslawski wrote in 1984 for Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug. Leonard in particular seemed to capture the very essence of Lutoslawski's strongly gestural writing, with its unusually angled melodic lines, rapid-fire reiterations, and disorienting ventures into microtones.
At three points in the work, Lutoslawski abandoned the conventions of ensemble between the players, and wrote separate violin and piano parts that are to be performed without co-ordination. This typically Lutoslawskian ploy was on this occasion integrated perfectly into the trajectory of the work as a whole.
Barrie Cooke,
Dorothy Cross
and Nick Miller
Fenton Gallery, Cork
Mark Ewart
Although this is a three-person show, the diversity of work included is more in keeping with a larger exhibition. And it is Dorothy Cross in particular who illustrates this diversity, as her work traverses alternative disciplines and media effortlessly. Throughout, we see a cohesive creative vision which is tempered by strong conceptual rigour, which lends unity to the disparate forms and images she explores.
Many of her artefacts are imbued with a personal dialectic which stems from her own upbringing and personal experiences. Many of the 3D works in particular utilise familiar objects such as trumpet, gloves and candlestick holder - each in turn juxtaposed with the surreal details of a gold cows teat, fingerprints and birds talons. All are integrated brilliantly and resonate with reflective wit and imagination.
At the centre of the show is the unshakeable presence of Barry Cooke, who was originally approached by the Fenton Gallery to suggest artists he has an affinity with. Many of the important themes and subjects of his work are represented here, such as landscape, fishing and portrait studies. In all there is his flair for spontaneous flourish of the brush, veiling the canvas with delicately expressed tones and iridescent colour.
Cooke's portrait of the third artist Nick Miller, is an intriguing work, as Miller himself contributes a narrow landscape backdrop across the top of the composition.
It works brilliantly. Miller's landscapes are beguiling affairs as the impasto and fluid brushwork activates every centimetre of the canvas. But it all sits together calmly, as subtly modulated tone and naturalistic colour meshes together to present convincing spatial depth and form that articulates the artist's deep attachment to the Irish landscape, in all its raw beauty.
Runs until 23rd May.
INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVALIRELAND
Once
Samuel Beckett Theatre
Michael Seaver
After she kicked her shoes off and walked downstage Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker met our eyes, said "Once!" and waited. It seemed that nothing much was happening in the silence and yet everything was happening. Twitches developed, and soon movements like a sudden turn, sinking plié and swinging arm were foretelling what were to become the building blocks of the dance. Introducing deconstructed material is a fairly standard choreographic device but there was more at work here: the moves were furtive and created a sensation of a body remembering and reawakening moves from its past.
Once takes De Keersmaeker back to her youth via a Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 record, to which she initially flits and mimics words, appearing flippant and revelling in the nostalgia. "This is my favourite!" she enthuses at one point and it all seems carefree, but you are never quite sure what is instinctual and what is carefully choreographed and she seems quite happy at playing up these confusions. Did she really forget the words in We Shall Overcome? (She forgets in every performance.) Were the unused foldaway chairs red herrings or did she make a choice during the piece not to use them? These ambiguities aren't just audience-teasers, but add to the feeling of personable informality.
The songs and her physical reactions point up a mourned loss of political idealism, but the political is personal. The mood is always darkening and towards the end video images of war are projected to the sounds of pacifist songs. But it is the image of De Keersmaeker herself that is most potent. At this stage naked except for a pair of black briefs what is laid bare onstage is her story and her sense of loss. The small movements at the beginning of the show, movements that contained the emotion and idealism of her youth, are inscribed in her body. This is all about Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker now: mother, artist and dreamer.
Between You & Me
Project, Dublin
The pas de deux is a classic form in dance that usually expresses the purest emotion between two characters within a bare, distraction-free stage. In programming a night of dance duets, husband and wife team Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick have advanced a form that was not only seminal and important to themselves as dancers, but that has also formed an integral part of their choreographic temperament. The duality of two bodies on stage goes far beyond the male/female norm and some of the works in this programme extended the range and expectations of the form. But at the heart of most was a conceptual narrative that harked back to the pas de deux form and its emotional heritage rather than a pure examination of duality.
Reflecting "the intimacy of the committed relationship (that) pulses with the alternation of passion and pain, discovery and disaffection", Scorpios, by Connor and Yurick, offered the most straightforward duet. Emotionally charged but physically held back, its vocabulary - heavily reliant on arms to clasp, reject or project inner feelings - was evenly distributed between the dancers so that differences were dramatic rather than corporal. Dara O'Brien's unfluctuating music barely underpinned the movement unlike the very first bars of Gerard Maimone's score for One 2 Free: a tango riff, two dancers on stage and there is immediately a charged atmosphere. Marie-Françoise Garcia and Alexandre Iseli, wearing body harnesses, grab and swing each other, echoing the weightless ballerina of the pas de deux. When shifting on to more conventional movement things get a bit predictable and it is the introduction of a third presence (in this case a simple stool) that provides a choreographic escape route.
Willi Dorner's Intertwining had a similarly unsatisfying ending as two men distil unison shadowing into a complete inseparableness, unlike Lonesome Cowboy by Philippe Saire, which begins with conflict and journeys to find a solution. The wrestling bodies of Mike Winter and Karl Paquemar (who surely got man-of-the-match in dancing three of the duets) explored give and take in an unobvious way, but through understatement seemed to capture the essence of the duet form. (MS)
