The Girl Who Believed in Magic
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
**
For her first miracle, in a new performance reportedly inspired by magic, the musician Julie Feeney will make her audience disappear. She does this, with the assistance of Mikel Murfi's inattentive direction and Paul Keogan's hermetically-sealed design of lights and video, by sealing herself into a box. We may see Feeney, the imaginatively unconventional musician, behind a translucent scrim, a canvas for moving images, but she doesn't see us. It is designed for disconnection. Alice in Wonderland, relayed through found-video clips, may be a reference, but in trying to become an artwork, Feeney is more firmly through the Looking Glass, distant and removed.
You could argue that this is just an accurate reflection of Feeney’s music, where ideas of love and heartbreak are estranged through clever arrangements and idiosyncratic vocals; effects that are arch and chilly, sometimes haunting. But even with a performer as studied in eccentricity as Feeney, this is not what we look for in live performance. For all their clichés, gigs are stubbornly human affairs, where the magic is to see music come to life before your eyes.
That's not really Feeney, who moves through her repertoire singing into a clunky hand-held microphone over backing tracks, pursuing a stream of bewildering set pieces. Here she is lying on the ground through opening numbers Aching and Stay, the first otherworldly, the second similar, and singing "I wish I could abate your desire to decorate your life," oblivious to the irony of someone subordinate to image.
For what benefit? Scanning an imaginary horizon, peering at pixelly screensavers of autumn leaves and liquid ripples, Feeney defeats any semblance of intimacy, which, in a venue this small, is almost an achievement. Iridescent in make-up, slipping through the crepuscular rays of Keogan's lights and contending with costumes by Umit Kutluk as ridiculous as they are awkward, she seems barely present, a dim apparition. It's a trick of sorts: now you see her, now you don't.
This wouldn’t be so infuriating if it wasn’t such a waste of a singular musical talent (the sound quality, for what its worth, is perfect) and a production almost cruelly inattentive to the audience. (For one of three unforgiveably long costume changes, we are left alone to watch a ticking clock.) We all deserve better.
When the screen finally drops, umpteen songs too late to make a difference, the show improves, and an unadorned rendition of Impossibly Beautiful, performed over just a breathy accordion, comes closest to the spirit of the magic act. It's also where the overhaul might begin, a softening of illusion and bid for connection, where nobody gets cut in half.
Until Apr 11
