Dublin Dance Festival Project Arts Centre

Vicky Shick might present predicable representations of femininity in Repair, but how she interweaves them into her choreography is never predicable. Set mostly in front of two loosely slung mesh curtains that suggest a conventional stage, her duet with Jodi Melnick meanders through sequences where everyday gestures lead into unison dance phrases and even a quotation from the 19th-century ballet Giselle. Here, the peasant girl is driven into madness and death after being promised marriage by a disguised nobleman, a histrionic represent- ation of fragility that pervades a century and a half later.

Similarly, Melnick displays timeless coquettishness as she vainly flicks lint off a dress wrapped with a spiral lighting tube to the sound of skittish utterances of pride or the two dancers languidly bend forward with arms floating out to the sides in stereotypically “soft” feminine movement. Barbara Kilpatrick’s design and Elise Kermani’s soundscape are equal partners to the choreography and help imbue poetry to the simplest of gesture or movement.

While Shick is happy to keep her form hidden, Alessandro Sciaronni pushes predictability and inevitability to the surface in Your Girl. The premise is simple: actress Chiara Bersani, who has Osteogenesis imperfecta, abandons her wheelchair and plucks rolled-up socks attached to her T-shirt. She feeds them into an industrial vacuum cleaner punctuating each one with, "he loves me . . . he loves me not". Behind her sits Matteo Ramponi, beside a hanging sculpture made of socks. Soon Bersani is naked, having fed her T-shirt and shorts into the vacuum, and stands before us. Ramponi joins her, and says (rather ambiguously), "I love him," and surrenders his clothes to the vacuum.

They hold hands as an Italian pop ballad swells and the stage in plunged into blackness.

Your Girl's honest simplicity quietly questions attitudes to representations of disability, love and desire and is eloquent in its understatement. The Italian company NNChalance similarly kept it's material lean in Se nn ricordo male(If I remember correctly), with its clever exploration of embodied memory.

Festival runs until May 23rd