Irish Timescritics review Taoub at the Abbey Theatre Nanset Wind Ensemble in Killarney, NCC/de la Martinez at the National Gallery and Disco Pigs in Cork
Taoub
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
"Why is there people walking?" asks a small voice from somewhere in the Abbey's auditorium as 12 figures in long white robes slip onto the stage in a vague half-light. My thoughts exactly. Anyone who has seen the publicity poster for Taoub - "they flip, they fly, they sing!" - might feel a little disappointed to discover that sometimes the Collectif Acrobatique de Tangier also stroll.
Within seconds, however, the members of this Moroccan circus ensemble are diving and darting (they dive, they dart!), sliding face-first upon Persian carpets, their bodies forming brisk patterns like a game of snakes and ladders. A lone musician strikes up an Arabic melody on a banjo while others sing (they ululate, they hoedown!). The male performers leap upon one another's shoulders and a female face is projected upon this impromptu double-decker structure, her eyebrows raising and lips pursing across their makeshift screen.
The French circus and dance director Aurélien Bory has been credited with "modernising" the acrobatic displays of the Hammich family, who form the core of the company, although this may be something of a ruse. Bory integrates video projections into the action, and encourages the two female performers to stride across the hands, backs and even necks of the males wearing contemporary street threads, but the tricks themselves are as old as the sands.
Deferring to tradition rather than innovation (you can't reinvent the cartwheel), this renders the physical feats no less delightful: a man, held aloft by four others, pivots back and forth like a giant metronome; a series of bodies peep through a fabric scrim - the "Taoub" in question - sending liquid ripples across the stage. Our amazement comes without hidden wires or pyrotechnics.
There may be a narrative somewhere beneath this assured and - at 60 minutes - brief spectacle, but you will need to bring a child to help you locate it. That child may wonder if there is specific cultural significance in watching a young woman from a relatively liberal Islamic country remove her headscarf and tie it to her waist. Distract them with a sweetie.
Just as the performance of circus skills in a literary theatre demands that the Abbey loosens up for a week, so the particularly vocal presence of kids in the audience frees up mature inhibitions. I counted as many adult "wows" as children's gasps when trampoline summersaults soared and three-tier castilleros climbed high.
That is one of the strongest pleasures of this gently diverting show - the acrobats will feed our imaginations if we will supply their soundtrack.
But one word of advice to the little girl who watched a woman bounce 30 feet into the air, kicking and yelping, and calmly announced, "I can do that". No, no. No, you can not.
Runs until July 21st
Peter Crawley
NCC/de la Martinez
National Gallery, Dublin
If the title of the National Chamber Choir's three summer programmes, The Eternal Feminine, has connotations beyond the soft, the gentle and the ladylike, the opening item of the second concert of the series absolutely confirmed this.
Indeed, the three-movement motet Help us, O God by the late- romantic New England composer Amy Beach staunchly allies itself to the Brahms tradition with a muscularity that's positively Amazonian.
Having started the NCC at full throttle, Cuban-born guest conductor Odaline de la Martinez allowed the voice production to surge into sharp overdrive at some of the subsequent climaxes. In Beach's central trio and concluding fugue, the triple metres might have been more springy.
But all this soon changed. In the pieces that followed, dynamic ranges were effectively graded, and tempos came off with an easy, often ebullient swing. Choir and conductor were evidently on friendly and sympathetic terms.
Two of the more rhythmic items were by token male composers. The voluble counterpoint of Villa-Lobos's Bachiana Brasileira No 9 was trenchantly syncopated, while Roberto Sierra's Guakía baba (1992) - which works up a collage of indigenous Puerto Rican syllables into a choral bossa nova - was especially light and lively.
On the reflective side were two contemporary works: Marjorie Merryman's subtly modulating and motet-like Evening, and Judith Weir's serenely articulate anthem to words by e. e. cummings, a blue true dream of sky, where the prominent solo soprano part was taken with musicianly poise by Aoife Miskelly.
Most impressive of all was the cycle of seven Love Songs (1997) by Augusta Read Thomas. Its piquant array of choral resources includes Sprechstimme, syllabic texturing, vocal pizzicato and marshmallow harmony, forming a brilliantly balanced setting for amorous and epigrammatic bons mots by poets from Pope to Emerson. And the choir loved it.
Andrew Johnstone
Nanset Wind Ensemble/Lysebo
WASBE International Conference, Killarney
Shostakovich - The Priest and his Servant Balda
Anything that could be regarded as a full opera would seem a most unlikely undertaking for a collegial gathering of wind and brass musicians. But opera is exactly what was offered at the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles international conference at INEC, Killarney, on Thursday.
This was no ordinary opera. It involved an animated film and life-size puppets, and the music dates back to the 1930s, when the young Dmitri Shostakovich was an experimentalist whose wings had not yet been clipped by the Soviet authorities. In his collaboration with director Mikhail Tsekhanovsky to create an animated film on Pushkin's Tale of the Priest and his Servant Balda it was the music which was written first, and the film which followed.
The ill-fated project stalled before completion, and all but six minutes of the animated film was lost in the siege of Leningrad in 1941. Those six minutes feature in the new production from Norway, which was premiéred in Killarney. It is directed by Anna Helgesen and brings together the excellent Nanset Wind Ensemble (strengthened with a handful of strings) under Odd Terje Lysebo, and the varied skill sets of choreographer Pelle Ask, art-director, designer and animator Hans Jørgen Sandnes, and narrator Lyder Verne. The musicians occupied the left half of the stage, with the film and action on the right.
The musical style of the work has more to do with the cutting satire of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk than the altogether more familiar Shostakovich of the Fifth Symphony. Balda is sharp, lurid and grotesque, short-breathed and sometimes corner-cutting in its search for immediacy, but always colourful and often imaginative in its instrumental combinations.
The tale involves a lazy priest hiring a worker for the most absurd of rewards, the right to strike the priest three times on the head at the end of the year. The priest tries to avoid the payment, and the complications involve competitions with devils, a love interest, and, finally, the priest losing his mind.
The puppet work was suitably fantastical: the priest statuesque, with a beard flowing in strips to his toes; his wife a squat, chunky wonder. Balda and the priest's daughter moved with an elegance that carried overtones of science-fiction aliens.
The film made good use of visual punning, but there were flat spots where the image simply froze or the stage remained empty. This left a suggestion that for all its imagination in rescuing an obscure score, the new production is still a work in progress.
The mix of languages was strange, too, the singers using Russian (most of the strong team of soloists) and German (the chorus), with the narration in heavily-accented English. But, niggles, apart - and the conductor, it has to be said, sometimes softened the surfaces of the music - this was an absorbing and fascinating evening with more than enough moments of imaginative magic to keep anyone happy. Its style of puppetry could certainly stand as an invitation to any composer interested in an unusual theatrical challenge.
Michael Dervan
Disco Pigs,
Granary, Cork
In its own relatively small way, Disco Pigs is probably as iconic in modern Irish theatre as some of the major titles of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy or Frank McGuinness. This is not to claim too much for Enda Walsh's disturbing play, written by a young man about two teenagers speaking a language and living in a world they have defined for themselves. It's a deprived world, but that has to be taken as given, because Walsh, carried on by the vitality of his inspiration, doesn't go into much social detail in a piece which is now nearly 10 years old.
In fact, at first it seems Sinéad and Darren have been born on the same day, in the same hospital ward, and to two mothers living adjacent to one another, into what might be loving families. Now Sinéad and Darren have redefined themselves as Runt and Pig and snort themselves into and out of a hectic 48 hours of danger and damage. Their disassociation is born out of a kind of symbiosis; dislodged somehow from the normal rhythms of ordinary life, they create an existence in which petty crime is the thrill energising and satisfying them, reaching orgasmic dimensions when casual but cruel violence is added. They speak in a brutally subversive argot: their city is Pork City in which, for example, French Church Street becomes French Crutch Street; indicating the psychological charge of the words, as though they, like much of the action, are illuminated by strobe lighting, fleeting but brilliant distortions of what is really being said, or seen.
Olan Wrynn's set of abandoned trolleys and detritus supports the imagery of outlawry and outcasts. Directed by Tony McCleane-Fay, lit by Kath Geraghty and driven by the thumping rhythms of Irene Buckley's soundtrack, the play remains significant, especially as Shane Casey's Pig is such a committed a performance, while Samantha Heaney's mobile features almost achieve a hint of the compassionate undertone Enda Walsh himself seems to have missed.
Runs until July 14th
Mary Leland
