Irish Times critics review Losing It in Cork, the Polish State Opera in Dublin and Cormac de Barra and Grada in Dublin.
Losing It
Fenton Gallery, Cork
Seasoned acolytes of contemporary art practice will take this heady mix of irony, tongue-in-cheek humour, disturbing imagery and bizarre scenarios in their stride. But even the uninitiated will find something of substance and meaning in Losing It, as collectively the selection eschews the sterile ambivalence that can be a by-product of new media practice.
The 11 artists assembled here span the globe but are united by the theme of losing control. The most tangible emotion is that of anger or confrontation, and N.I.C.J.O.B's contribution deals brilliantly with it. Here segments from an Alan Corneau film are cleverly edited together showing an actor throwing a tantrum, bristling with rage and bellowing to an exhilarating break-beat soundtrack.
Mary Kelly's piece Baby Blue is equally intense but is more difficult to deal with, as it comprises a close-up view of a baby's distressed wailing. This penetrates to the core, and you yearn to reach out and calm the child; frustrated, you decry the lack of intervention from the person behind the camera. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's baleful reflections on suicide composed from within a psychiatric hospital are equally unsettling, but for obviously different reasons.
Fortunately, it's not all pathos, as the concept of losing control has more positive manifestations, many having a humorous edge that will yield a wry smile from even the starchiest of viewers. Peter Land's tragi-comedy Step Ladder Blues shows a painter falling off a ladder to the strains of Wagner. Sofia Hulten's Gray Area presents an office worker hiding from her boss, devising hilariously opportunistic situations for concealment. After a day like that she would have benefited from Yak Beow Seah's five-day residency as he offered free massages. The nicest possible way to lose it!
Mark Ewart
• Runs until March 28th
Polish State Opera of Wroclaw
Helix, Dublin
Carmen - Bizet
Reports about the Polish State Opera of Wroclaw's La Traviata were encouraging. But the company's second offering at the Helix, Bizet's Carmen, turned out to be a disappointment. Unlike the Calixto Bieito production for Opera Ireland last April, Teresa Kujawa's colourfully costumed staging is on the staid side of conventional. Her vision of the girls from the cigarette factory is quite genteel, and the sexual tension she creates between Carmen and Don José is virtually nonexistent.
Carmen is, of course, among the most memorably tuneful of operas, so all is not necessarily lost in a dull staging. But conductor Ewa Michnik, who's also the general director of the Wroclaw company, took a dry-as-dust approach to the music. And her efforts were not helped by the acoustic impact of the heavy drapes that framed the stage and seemed to soak up much of the sound produced by singers and players. Dorota Dutkowska went efficiently through the motions as Carmen but without creating a sense of engagement, either musical or dramatic. Her Don José, Marek Szymanski, ranged from a strange passivity to a vocal enthusiasm that sounded rather uncouth without the safety net of a reliably accurate aim. And the large-toned Escamillo of Jerzy Mechlinski quite missed the rhythmic snap and swagger his music demands. The finest singing of the evening came from Ewa Czermak, whose Micaëla sounded to be a good girl who knows a thing or two and, in the world of this production, surely deserved to get her man.
The evening turned out to be more a reminder of how consistently tuneful an opera Carmen is than anything else.
Michael Dervan
Cormac de Barra & Gráda
NCH & Whelans, Dublin
If it was extremes you were after, the weekend's swathe of gigs would have sated your appetite, no bother. Harpist Cormac de Barra cast open the door of the National Concert Hall's John Field Room as if it were the parlour and invited us in for a few tunes. Partnered with fellow harpist Anne Marie O'Farrell, this was a lunchtime gig that combined drawing-room grandeur with impish experimentation, then left a little room for Dexter Gordon to peep through. De Barra and O'Farrell approach their music from places so diametrically opposed that you'd expect them to collide mid-stream. Instead we got de Barra's disciplined repertoire melting into O'Farrell's more playful and surprisingly jazz-tinged tunes. The session was ably rounded by Eamon de Barra, who brought flute and whistles along and lent his freewheeling bonhomie to the afternoon.
St Patrick's Night in Whelans was an altogether different affair. Gráda's trademark is their high-octane repertoire and, after this performance, their aversion to anything approaching silence or space. Every set and tune is packed with arrangements; the few slow airs brave enough to make an appearance are quickly shunted aside by hyperactive sets groaning beneath overenthusiastic arrangements.
Which is not to say Gráda didn't please the crowd, but Anne Marie O'Malley's voice, one of Gráda's huge strengths, wrestled to be heard above the soupy arrangements that ran shy of the smallest of spaces in favour of a tsunami of sound. Hip-swivelling, eardrum-tingling they may be, but expect no breathtaking originality when there's mawkish mayhem to be made instead.
Siobhán Long
