Irish Times writers review John Cooper Clarke in Whelan's, traditional and contemporary dance from the Now Dance Company in the Draíocht Arts Centre and the Volger Spring Festival in Drumcliffe.
Vogler Spring Festival, St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe
The Vogler Spring Festival, now in its eighth year, seems such a permanent fixture it would be easy to take it for granted. And Sligo Arts Service, the arts arm of Sligo County Council, which produces the festival, would probably be even easier to take for granted. The service was set up in 1997 and used its own 10th anniversary as the hook to commission a new work for young people and expose a younger generation to the annual concert-giving that takes place in Drumcliffe every May Bank Holiday weekend.
Elaine Agnew's This is Me! evolved out of workshops involving six primary schools, whose pupils' work fed into both text (with the assistance of the writer Eibhlín Nic Eochaidh) and music (ultimately shaped by Agnew) of a piece for choir (made up of pupils from Ardkeerin National School), piano (Lorna Horan) and string quartet (the Voglers themselves).
The texts, focusing on happiness, indelible memories, and big, fat lies, are vivid and clear, and Agnew has provided music with a directness to match. Her aim sometimes seemed a little low, with word setting that allowed rather too much wrong-way-around accentuation, and too little highlighting of words that children themselves would surely emphasise.
But the performance was a hearty one, and a good time seemed to be had by all.
Coupled with the new work was a Children's Suite from the 1920s by Joseph Achron (1886-1943), a man best-known for music in the vein of Jewish nationalism, whose Hebrew Song was recorded more than once by the great violinist Jascha Heifetz. The short, programmatic movements of the suite, interestingly scored for clarinet (Chen Halevi), piano (Jascha Nemtsov) and string quartet, lightly explore children's concerns from a less technologically oriented age, wittily beginning with a complaint that persists to this day, I'm Bored.
My day-and-a-half sampling of this year's programme found the Voglers in much tighter form than last year. They gave a rigorous, late-night account of the sequence of meditative slow movements that make up Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, the firmness of the playing seeming to my ears to move the music on a little too fast and shift it sometimes out of the world of the sacred and into the realm of the secular.
The performance billed Niall Henry as speaker. But instead of the scriptural discourse that might have been expected, all he did was baldly speak the title of each movement in advance. Bizarre.
Ríona O'Duinnín was the light and sprightly flautist in a performance of Mozart's charming Flute Quartet in D, K285. She was matched in lightness by the cellist Monika Leskovar, with Alina Ibragimova and Graham Oppenheimer adopting a more pressured style on violin and viola. The Voglers shed their leader and adopted Leskovar as second cellist for the Quartet in A minor, Op 35, by the 19th-century Russian Anton Arensky. The players seemed to be greatly taken by the low-range richness of the writing in a work that gives everyone a chance to shine.
Tenor Robin Tritschler, with Nemtsov at the piano, offered a programme of songs with Jewish connections, some no more than token, others running altogether more deeply. The surprise here came in the Chants Populaires Hébraïques by Darius Milhaud, who seemed to find a breadth of response that brought his settings to places the other songs simply didn't reach. Tritschler was on strong form, even in the face of accompaniments from Nemtsov that sometimes downplayed the harmonic content of the music.
The last of the concerts I heard was a solo piano recital by John O'Conor, who framed a not always sure reading of Scriabin's Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, with explosive accounts of sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert. - Michael Dervan
Now Dance Company, Draíocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown
Finding the perfect mixture of traditional and contemporary dance preoccupies dancers throughout the world. Heaven knows choreographic alchemists here have long sought to create a new vocabulary by adding traditional steps to their ballet or contemporary dance mix and stirring hard. More often than not the elements don't gel and lumps of one or the other form remain unintegrated.
Inyoung Sohn, artistic director of the Now Dance Company from Korea, has developed a repertoire - neatly divided into traditional dance, reconstructed tradition, and contemporary dance works based on tradition - where the old and new seamlessly segue into one another. So, a rural folk dance might be performed alongside a contemporary dance improvisation, or a solo dancer with interactive video projection might follow traditional music played on a third-century gayageum. Most palpable in each dance, and throughout the event, is the interrelatedness of the elements, the interchange between ying and yang.
This is particularly evident in the solo dancing of Inyoung Sohn. Like all great dancers, every single part of her body moves with intent and never just follows along or obeys gravity. In Herjung (deceptive appearance), a trailing train of fabric is crumpled and blackened on the end to appear like a calligraphy brush. She moves into a rectangle of white light, really a video projection from above, and writing appears under the brush's slow strokes, only to disappear. The letters emanate from the curvilinear paths of the dancing, the same kinds of paths traced by the seven dancers in the later Buchaechum (fan dance). Their colourful opening tableau of a flower drew instant applause and this most commonly known Korean dance was performed with a reverence that was never joyless.
DungDung DongDong is an onomatopoeic word for the drum sounds a widow plays as she prays for her dead husband. Inyoung Sohn was captivating, with her soft movements always concentrated and it movingly illustrated the cycle between life and death. More drums featured in the finale, Gabae, this time as a noisy, raucous and joyful re-construction of a harvest celebration. - Michael Seaver
John Cooper Clarke, Whelan's, Dublin
A cult act for more than 30 years and a man who has simply refused to dip his toes into the mainstream, Salford's John Cooper Clarke remains a singular figure. Now in his 60s, he first came to notice in the mid-1970s as a support act/foil for Manchester's punk rock elite - the Fall, Buzzcocks, Joy Division. His speed- mouth delivery, espousal of poetry as social realism mixed with often stupendous jokes, and stick-insect-with- a-Dylan-haircut image conspired to make him a figure of fun for all the right reasons.
That Cooper Clarke is still around says something for the appeal of his material, which I'd suspect is nowhere near as widespread as some people might think. He's been through some dreadful hard drug years, years that have taken their toll on his physical appearance (emaciated is a kind description), but his creativity and his love of performing is clearly on point.
Now picking up new fans through his influence on Arctic Monkeys, Cooper Clarke is on something of a roll. Which is why a few nights ago, Scotch whisky in one hand and poetry book in the other, looking for all the world like a beat-up Beat poet, he delivered a performance that has to rank as one of the funniest this writer has seen in many years.
It isn't all poetry, however, but rather a mixture of stand-up comedy (zinger jokes, surreal observations, on-the-spot improvisational riffing), limericks, irony and questions (the latter of which included such thought-provoking queries as "what does occasional furniture do the rest of the time?" and "is there another word for thesaurus?").
The gladdening news is that Cooper Clarke has stopped trading on past successes, reciting little of the poetry that made him a very small household name all those years ago; the creative juices are flowing again in excellent (yet quite typical) works such as It's a Hire Car Baby, Home Honey I'm High and You'll Always Get a Guy with a Pie. He brings the evening to a close with his school curriculum-listed Beasley Street (a modern poetry classic by anyone's standards) and surprises everyone by following it with a superb and worthy sequel, Beasley Boulevard.
Worryingly thin, a bit drunk, quick- witted and still very much his own man - will someone please give Cooper Clarke the crossover recognition he deserves? - Tony Clayton-Lea
