Rosemary Butcher CompanyGreen on Red GalleryMichael Seaver

Cunningham may have taken dance back to the Abbey last week, but Rosemary Butcher's performance at the Green and Red Gallery rekindled shorter memories of the old Lombard Street Studios, home of many Irish and international dance performances in the past 20 years. Its transformation from theatre to gallery was reciprocated on stage, as the audience sat around a square white dance floor marked out with black gaffa tape, like a framed blank canvas for the performers.

The setting and its intimacy reflect the ideas and ideals of choreographer Rosemary Butcher, a major figure in British new dance (but hardly, as the programme asserts, "indisputably the single most influential figure"). Many claim that she creates not as a theatrical choreographer but as a visual artist, and Scan gives credence to that thinking. Four dancers enter the space and immediately pair off as strips of light are projected from above. The duets are performed inches away from the audience, so we observe the minutiae of the action. They thump to the ground and we feel our seats shake; their outstretched arms invade our personal space and even a dislodged hair-clip lands at our feet.

The movement is cold, uncompromising and reeks of isolation. Bound by the small space, interior bodily impulses never quite get expressed externally. Although the duets demand a great deal of interaction and trust between performers, the dancers never really dance together, each existing within their own immediate sensory environment. As two dancers leave the space, a video is projected from above on the other pair, showing hands playing with a light source. The remaining performers leave, and we are then left to focus uninterrupted on the video on the white floor. Unconscious movement of fingers and toes, filmed during the rehearsals for the piece, present us with another lens on the choreographer's desire to explore the body's inner life and exterior physicality. Dancers never re-appear, and the video plays out the conclusion of the work.

While other choreographers of her generation have assimilated the essence of British new dance, Rosemary Butcher is still distilling and refining those ideals, but the result, as in Scan, can appear cold and unfeeling.

Austin McQuinn

Project Cube

Michael Seaver

the annoyance of many an artist, competition and art are combining more and more these days. From Booker Prize to Feis Ceoil, the ideal of the "best" art winning the prize appeals to audiences. Instant evaluation and validation produce a fitting end to a good night out. Traditional Irish dance is inextricably linked to the competition culture, and even if the formula of garish embroidered gúnas and flowing ringlets (or wigs) has been usurped by the short black skirt and straightened hair of the nouveau Riverdance set, the basic premise remains: dance to win.

Virtuoso is a collaboration between visual artist Austin McQuinn and traditional dancer Louise McDonald now showing at The Cube in Project. A video runs throughout the day, but every evening McQuinn adds himself as a live presence to the proceedings. Resembling a medieval knight in armour, he stands on a metal half-sphere in the middle of the gallery space, covered from head to toe in Irish dancing medals. His bare feet continually have to shift and adjust to maintain balance, and every tiny move is signalled by the clinking of the medals. A video of Louise McDonald's dancing is projected behind.

She goes through a warm-up and various routines, not for the camera, but for herself. Dressed in neutral black against a bare white stage, the quickly changing edited shots of sequences go through a range of shots before culminating in her clattering out steps clad with hundreds of dancing medals. The resonances are multi-layered: the medals ostentatiously restrict the ability of the dancer to dance, yet are an outward valuation of the talent of the dancer.

On video, the shimmering medals also resemble the glitter of the tacky showgirl costumes; and while they look good on the screen, the presence of the uncomfortable live body weighed down by medals tempers our perspective. While its limpid imagery may seem over-simplistic, Virtuoso succeeds in exploring a major dilemma in traditional Irish dance. How do we evaluate it?

Virtuoso runs until May 19th at The Cube in Project from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Live performance daily from 5 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.