Going back to an old workplace is like visiting your hometown on a bank holiday. I mean, it takes a special occasion to get you back in the first place, which means it’s not quite an ordinary day in the life. And yet…just being present is somehow enough. Enough to let the once ordinary shine through: Everything you liked about the place. All you disliked. Everything new there. And everything now gone. It’s amazing how old haunts haunt us.

What that means to someone like me, someone lucky enough to have worked in DanceHouse, is that every performance (or sharing, or presentation) becomes a weird kind of homecoming dance. Which I guess makes yesterday’s Re-Presenting Ireland a monster parade, tailgate and pep-rally all rolled into one…

Over the course of Friday afternoon, in the environs of the Joanna Banks Studio, a selection of work by dance artists in Ireland was presented, some more complete than others. Curiously, to this viewer, the works of these mixed bills seemed - when considered together - to form an unusual symmetry.

Though differing in tone and ultimate effect, Elena Giannotti (The Crow) and Angie Smalis (The Lightly Fragranced Solo) both proffered compositions of appressed phrasing, where a compact alternation of motion, tempo and direction suggested the natural, the autonomic, and any number of complex processes not subject to volition.

Arguably, a kinship in language and theme could be traced between Iseli-Chiodi Dance Company’s >Me Seeing You< and Dance Theatre of Ireland’s Handle With Care, one that goes deeper than the use of duet. Still in the initial stages of development, DTI’s piece concerning love, proximity to another, and transformation, guilelessly conformed to the notes accompanying it. By contrast, though displaying the strengths of its performers, >Me Seeing You< didn’t quite succeed in its stated creative ambitions, at least by my estimation. It did, however, underline the difficulties of effectively incorporating multimedia elements into live performance.

Finally, we have Liv O’Donoghue’s This Woman I Met and Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s ACTIONS, both of which impressed greatly.

With just a chair, a pair of gold shoes, a score  consisting largely of Steven Wright’s deadpan delivery of surreal one-liners and  choreography as adroit as it was fluid and intelligent, O’Donoghue leveraged my attention, sympathy and self-consciousness in an understated yet genuinely touching manner.

And ACTIONS? Well, yesterday I wrote that John Scott can’t speak Spanish. I still think that’s so…but by God, he’s fluent in dance, as evidenced by this work of assiduousness, boldness and dexterity. The interaction of dancers Michael Snipe Jr and Marc Mann, both with each other and the audience, was boisterous, friendly, rivalrous…and utterly entertaining. Yet beneath all that there existed a sober, serious intent. A sense of the purposeful, of work, and of getting work done. Their brusqueness in delivery – whether of quip or gesture – fascinated. And how, even at points of the greatest physical exertion and tension, the notion abided that these were rehearsing performers, running practiced routines, for roles (and lives?) so all-consuming that truly noticing the other becomes unimaginable.

Re-Presenting Ireland runs again today as well as next weekend at DanceHouse. And you can book your tickets right here.