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.

I feel a clarification is in order.

A few days ago, on this very blog, I confessed (not altogether seriously) that I’d love to see an audience that cared enough to storm a stage. Well, at last night’s performance of Repair, two doughty spectators cared enough to get up, give voice to their disgruntlement and trundle themselves loudly out of the auditorium. And my goodness, the indignation was palpable. Goaded they were, by God, to take this stand. Scammed they were, by God, for the king’s ransom of twenty euro.

So, to clarify: ladies, whilst I appreciate the gesture, I’m afraid that’s not at all what I’d requested. By storm, I’d meant invasion on principle,  not evasion of the recondite. I wanted dash and daring – not dull and indolent. No, it simply won’t do. Nothing less than a melée of frenzied mavens will meet my needs.

Frankly, I felt a little embarrassed for you. After all, nothing could be worse than picking the wrong battle.

Because Repair really is such a fine, eminently accomplished dance piece. Visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick, composer Elise Kermani and choreographer Vicky Shick have created a work greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not too much to suggest that both Kermani’s score and Kilpatrick’s set and costume design almost constitute characters. Yet the true alembic of the work, it must be acknowledged, is Shick and Jodi Melnick’s duet. In action precise and succinct, both women bring an airy – yet strangely, never unsubstantial – quality into presence. Again and again, the relationship of these women to each other presents itself to us for interrogation. At times, they seem to dance together. Just as often, Shick appears a hidden guide, or the disguised helper in some little known folktale. Mostly, though, you sense that these two reside in different worlds, so that even when face to face, they see each other only through a glass darkly – if at all.

And personally speaking, I find Melnick a wonder. With angular grace, she has the power to infuse motion with a turbulent intensity. And yet, it’s an intensity not at all fraught with emotion. Remarkable.

Alas, my revolutionary guards seemed to have missed all this. What a pity. They will be relieved to learn, however, that their outburst was not the most shocking thing I heard in the auditorium last night. That particular distinction goes to the estimable John Scott and the appalling disservice done by him to the Spanish language.

Lo siento, señor Scott, pero no puedes hablar Español…so for the love of God, cease and desist….

If memory serves, it’s been a good two months since Ellie Creighton bought me coffee in Dunne & Crescenzi. Damn good coffee, too. To anyone who knows her, Creighton is the little marketing machine that could. She’s a workaholic with a heart of gold, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and nobody pulls off Jazz Age chic quite like the girl in marketing.

All that makes her likeable. But what makes her interesting is this look she gets sometimes. It’s the kind of look you imagine her getting at a house party, the second she decides she’s going to liven things up. By, y’know, jumping a fence, hotwiring a cement truck and going drag racing on the M50 at four in the morning.

Now, our coffee time was meant to sketch out how this blog should work. And sure, we sketched. But mostly we talked. Actually, mostly Ellie talked – about all the shows lined up, about how everything was falling into place, about how excited she was…

And then she stopped. And got a look in her eye. Correction…she got that look in her eye. ‘There’s this show and it’s got a guy and a girl. And there are these socks, and she’s feeding things into a hoover and…’ She paused. ‘I loved it. I won’t say anymore, but I can’t wait to see what you think.’

She was talking about Alessandro Sciarroni’s Your Girl, a work that, based as it is on Madame Bovary, implicity evokes the incongruity of romantic ideal and unmitigated reality. And yet its ultimate impact is quite contrary to what might be expected of such a provenance.

Under stark lighting, Chiara Bersani and Matteo Ramponi (downstage right, in a wheelchair, and upstage left respectively) meet, challenge but above all engage the audience’s attention. Moving to centre, where an industrial hoover is situated, Bersani first divests herself of her wheelchair’s support. Then, she proceeds to carefully pluck cloth ‘roses’ from her top, each bloom vanishing into the vacuum with a ‘he loves me’, or ‘he loves me not’. Then the top itself and finally her shorts. Each time she switches on the vacuum, her hair is caught, snatched at and whirled around by the expelled air, as if each statement coincides with and expresses an instant of intense emotion.

In the meantime, Ramponi - sitting on a mound of discarded socks and attaching his own socks to three ‘sock ropes’ dangling behind - maintains throughout a self-conscious yet passive demeanour. Joining her, he too strips, Bersani feeding his clothes into the machine (almost without interruption).

As the now naked pair gingerly find each other’s hand, an Italian pop ballad swells triumphantly, bringing this meditation on desire and yearning, self-consciousness and fragility to a quietly affecting and successful conclusion. I only wish we’d had a clearly demarcated ending so that I could have properly expressed my appreciation.

Although it could be asked whether Your Girl veers more towards the installation end of the performance art spectrum, the same could not be asked of the show that preceded it: Se nn ricordo male (If I remember correctly). With a muscular choreography soundly embodied, Eleonora Gennari and Valeria Fiorini establish a vigorous and varied tempo that dispels any hint of the cumbersome or ponderous. In this ‘monologue recited by two voices’, both dancers quite remarkably lend corporeal form to the trace and flash of memory. In motion that though territorially expansive seems ever under restraint, the act of (finally) slipping hands out of pockets is a relief, and pulling feet from shoes, a liberation. The climactic ending underscores it all: the raking violence of emotional memory, how the hook and haul of recall and remembrance can - at one and the same time – drive us towards and deter us from, ransoming the present from the past.

Which reminds me….kudos Creighton. I owe you a coffee.

Following on from yesterday evening’s adventures, let me offer a little advice, in reverse order of importance:

1. Eat something if you’re going to drink anything.

2. See if there are any tickets left for Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical/Spiraling Down. Do it now. Right here.

Now let me explain why.

With RoS Indexical, Rainer uses one of the pivotal moments of recent dance history to fashion an often exhilarating work, capable of provoking both thought and laughter. How she manages this is perhaps most succinctly expressed in the title -  an indexical being an expression whose content varies from context to context. In this case, that expression is an event that has passed into dance lore - the 1913 Paris premiere of Rite of Spring.

RoS opens with four dancers seating themselves at a card table, putting on headphones and, in attempting to sing Stravinsky’s overture, replicating somewhat the effect the dissonance of Stravinsky’s music had almost a century ago. Yet what was (reputedly) for that audience an annoyance, was for those watching last night, a source of interest and even amusement.

Right from the outset, then, mutability of meaning (and thus, reception) is embraced. Throughout, the dancers’ ebullient performance is accompanied - and counterpointed - by the sound score of the BBC’s Riot at the Rite. At one point, the dancers ‘step off-stage’ and behind a large sofa, drinking water, talking and resting. At another, the stage is invaded by spectators planted in the audience, outraged at this ‘travesty’ of a now revered classic. And I’ve gotta say, I loved the touch of two indignant protestors dressed in Roerich’s original costume design…

Rainer’s second work, Spiraling Down, I found to have quite a different tone: Ravel’s Bolero, and a story about running (or a runner) spoken from a lectern by the dancers, or in Rainer’s own recorded voice, constituting the score. The movement of the performers reflected this athletic theme, but it’s movement infused with a giddy, frivolous energy that complements the intricate patterns of motion…and towards the end, it assumes an almost hypnagogic character with arm-whirling hunters in pursuit of prey, spiraling off stage and back again.

Now, before I go any further, I have to go right back to the start of the evening and the show Sunstruck. In a darkened Smock Alley, with nothing more than a circle of chairs, a single light source and two male dancers (Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville) dressed in black, Sunstruck created an amazing sense of utterly abstract space, and of cyclical motion within that space. And as the revolution of their bodies conjured with the relativity of distance - now infinitely far, now intimately close - the unhurried rise and fall of light, body and voice wore away the substance of all of it, of all existence. All emptied out, picked clean, worn bare and evoking in this spectator what he imagines is the sensation of happening upon the sun-bleached scattered purity of bones in a desert.

That emptying out of substance sort of brings me in a roundabout way back to RoS Indexical. As one of the founders of  Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union, Rainer was a part of a generation which, in its rejection of the constraints of modern dance and ballet, seems almost a recursion of the avant-garde of the early 20th century. That still earlier generation didn’t just test limits. They tore them down, overleapt them, inverted and subverted them. And because people (as a society, or as a class within a society) held a firm, at times absolutist conviction about the inviolability of an art form’s canon, code, standard or form…well, to see it violated couldn’t help but incite a firestorm of reaction.

What’s peculiar to me is how each iteration of this impulse seems fated to be weaker and less impactful than that which preceded it. I suppose it’s simply a testament to the success of all such movements (like the Dada movement) that it’s hard to imagine any audience being thrown into convulsions of outrage by anything.

And I guess that’s a good thing.

That said, I have to admit that sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I’d love just once to see an audience that cared enough to storm a stage. Unrehearsed.

Which in turn brings me back to my first bit of advice - why you need to eat something if you plan to drink anything…

We’re back!

That’s right. Yesterday evening’s proceedings kicked off with a wine reception in the Clarence and carried on well into overtime with a headphone disco in Meeting House Square. In between, I raved with actor and fitness guru Pall Gale about the most revolting film ever, discussed how childbirth can level the intellectual playing field in men’s favour with a step-dancing PR consultant, and drank at least one glass too many. Ah, the hazards of festival blogging…

Now, any given year presents festival organisers with their own hazards and crises. But 2010 promises to test the limits of even the most agile team. Already the trollish Eyjafjallajökull has made its mark in the Irish festival calendar, most notably Galway’s Cúirt literary festival. The concern must now be that travel restrictions will similarly affect  DDF 2010.  Indeed Philip Connaughton  - performing in Rex’s Secondary Sources - was telling me how, right after his flight landed yesterday, Irish airspace was shut down.

That said, the way Maureen Kennelly and her team - and the Irish literary sector as a whole - reacted to April’s madness was revelatory. The generosity of spirit, time and forbearance shown by all was truly inspiring. And if Laurie Uprichard’s words last night were any indication, that same sanguine character and settled determination will shape the dance world’s response to any upheaval.

Of course, the centre-piece of the evening was junk ensemble’s Five Ways to Drown. A world premiere and the festival’s inaugural performance, Megan and Jessica Kennedy’s latest work continues an engagement with memory - and the ambiguities inherent to any act of remembrance - to be found in their earlier works, Rain Party and Drinking Dust.  A quality of vivid fragmentation is present throughout, one where apparent discontinuities of action still somehow manage to resonate together to create meaning. Along with a reoriented seating arrangement and the contributions of Aedín Cosgrove and Denis Clohessy, the overall effect is akin to that of a dream.

As always, the choreography is polished and engaging. The cleverness and physicality of movement - where bodies spiral, cling and clamber, where dancers may fling themselves or be flung -  all this appeals and intrigues. And yet last night, something else caught my attention. And that was the abiding quality of each performer. The Kennedy sisters easily capture a spectator’s attention…but sometimes, I’m sure intentionally, in a way that is distant, or a little removed. As if giving form to an impersonal archetypal principle.

By contrast, Lee Clayden seems to embody the humanity, fragility and heart necessary to give the finale its poignant impact. It’s a poignancy that reminds us how, in watching this, we watch a soul caught, dancing, between Scylla and Charybdis.

And that’s why this show works, I think.

It’s not the undoubted technical ingenuity and craft of all involved. It’s how it reminds us that we’re all drowning, right from our first breath. And that each breath we take means something.

Okay, so that’s Five Ways to Drown. If you can, get a ticket. But even if you can’t, we have 23 artists/companies still to catch, from 9 countries, in eight venues.. And only one game in town.

So let’s go. Let’s count it down…

PERFORATIONS FESTIVAL
DUBROVNIK & ZAGREB
24-30 SEPTEMBER 2009

Should anyone invite you to Dubrovnik , drop everything and go!  What an amazing city; it combines a long and troubled history with stunning architecture and the surrounding sea.  The complexity of such a combination is mind boggling.  Looking through a book on the 1990’s war with photos of massive destruction, it is hard to believe that, not 20 years later, thousands of tourists get off cruise ships each morning and fill the streets with shoppers.

Organised by Zvonomir Dobrovic, the founder of the ground-breaking festival, Queer Zagreb, this first Perforations Festival included theatre, dance and performance art from Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as Croatia.  The first three days took place in Dubrovnik, the next three in Zagreb.  There is a strong conceptual streak in contemporary visual art as well as performing arts in the region and the borders between the genres are quite fluid.  Siniša Labrović is one such conceptual artist whose work is often critical of today’s culture.  His work, Perpetuum Mobile, posits that the body is a self-sustainable unit.  This is illustrated, for 15 minutes, by the expulsion and ingestion of his own urine.  This was, hands down, the most radical of the performances we saw, an especially tough one for my jet-lagged American colleagues sitting in the front row.

Via Negativa is a Slovenian theatre company that, over the past several years, has been working on a series of performances investigating the seven deadly sins.  One piece incorporates the role of the dead rabbit from Joseph Beuys’ first exhibition, another involves a rhythmic game with knives in which the hands of the two performers are nicked, leaving bloody traces.

Branko Brezovec , a pioneer of Croatian theatre from the 1970’s, founded the theatre group Coccolemocco at the age of 15.  So So, a co-production with the French Compagnie des Loups, was performed in a penthouse hotel suite in Cavtat, south of Dubrovnik on the border of Montenegro.  Three actors, speaking in French and Croatian, engage in mysterious and portentous behaviours.  The full moon, setting into the sea, added an ineffable element of décor.

Dance artists included Dalija Aćin from Serbia whose work, Duets/Meet the Expectations involved individual audience members entering a performance area with the choreographer which was visible from the viewing area but acoustically isolated.  I was only able to stay long enough to watch two of these encounters, in both of which the pair conversed but never moved.  BADco., from Croatia, presented a work entitled The League of Time.  A “mad” scientist filled blackboards with endless equations while two women seemed to chase futurist possibilities, bounding in and out of the space, “flying” on a ladder etc.

The Slovenian choreographer Mala Kline showed a work in progress, The End, “a game piece” somewhat inspired by Artaud.  Trying on, trying out characters to see what we, the audience, wanted, she became more and more frantic but never quite found her answer.
Ivo Dimčev is a Bulgarian choreographer whose solo, Lili Handel, has toured widely.  In Dubrovnik, he presented that solo plus Paris, created for Christian Bakalov, a fellow Bulgarian dancer currently based in that city.  An extreme performance, Bakalov’s tasks involve both the painful (hopping on his knees) and the risky (slip-sliding on a painted – or bloody –floor).  A poignant portrait emerges of the anger and humiliation one experiences as an immigrant.  A happy substitution for a company that had to cancel was the young Macedonian choreographer Kire Miladinoski who presented One Way Inside, a short solo and a duet with Ana Josifovska.  His vocabulary Is very personal and I hope to see more of his work.

The schedule was intense, with performances starting from 7pm and going until after midnight.  But this gave us day time to see the islands off the coast of Dubrovnik and swim in the sea – a great bonus.  Heading back to the hotel at 1:30am one night also gave us the incredible opportunity to see the main street empty.  Five stars!

VENTANA DE DANZA MADRILEÑA
17-20 SEPTEMBER

This “Window on Madrid Dance” was organised by the Madrid Regional Government to showcase 20 works – both full works and excerpts - by Madrid’s dance companies over four days.  The second edition of this biennial event, the performances and studio showings took place in the new Canal Theatres and the Canal Dance Centre (with nine studios!).  About 70 programmers and professionals were in attendance, 18 of them from outside Spain – from as near as Portugal and as far away as Egypt.

The work covered a very broad range from traditional Spanish and “new flamenco” to experimental, from children’s work and family events to ballet.  But no matter what the genre, an intensive energy permeated every performance.  The commitment of the dancers and musicians was wholehearted and their technical skills were, across the board, more than equal to the choreography’s requirements.

The event was an excellent introduction to the work being created in the Region of Madrid, which is less well known internationally than the work from Catalunya – primarily from the city of Barcelona – which seems to tour more widely.  Madrid’s contemporary artists include Pedro Berdayes and Chevi Muraday, who have been working for many years, and Daniel Abreu and Janet Novàs, relative newcomers.  All these artists incorporate strong visual imagery in their work.  Prominent flamenco artists included Aída Gómez and Antonio Najarro, both of whom have a stage presence that singes everyone in the house.  Both Najarro and Cruceta Flamenco, a newer company, add jazz musicians to their ensembles.  Ballet de la Comunidad de Madrid – Compañia Victor Ullate comprises a host of well-trained young dancers who revel in the partnering and split second timing of contemporary ballet.

Ana Cabo, Mar López and Fanny Skouvari, the organisers, were indefatigably cheerful and kept us on schedule from morning through night.  Fortunately, they included long lunches and late dinners to keep our energy up!  Saturday night of this weekend was Noche Blanca, or White Night, and there was, I’m told, dancing in the streets till the wee hours!

TANZ IM AUGUST
21-23 AUGUST

After arriving, I found my way to UferHallen, a rehearsal studio north of the city.  The U-Bahn is fairly decipherable, even for a non-German speaker, and I had good directions and a Google map.  A pair of U.S. artists, Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppielo, was working on their new creation, Loop Diver, a piece that would open in October at the University of Nebraska’s Lied Center.  Since Mark has moved to Berlin, they were finding it more efficient and less expensive to work in Europe.  As Mark’s contribution of media and sets was not yet in place, it was a good challenge to imagine those visual elements behind the looping choreographic material.

From there we went, in a smashing thunderstorm, to the HAU (an amalgamation of several theaters on the banks of the River Ufer, anchored by the Hebbel am Ufer) to see Parades & Changes, Replays, a re-interpretation of Anna Halprin’s pioneering 1965 work, Parades & Changes.  Directed by French choreographer Anne Collod, the work features an international cast.  Although not an exact imitation of the original work, the cast traveled to Halprin’s northern California studio (designed by her husband, Lawrence Halprin, the renowned landscape architect who died on 25 October), for her approval of the props and the working concepts.  Comparing this version to an archival film I’ve seen, the 21st century performance is much more polished and presentational but retains a fundamental honesty that was greatly appreciated by the audience.

David Zambrano’s Shock* was presented at Radialsystem V, a space that is the home of Sasha Waltz & Guests but, as a privately funded space, is also regularly rented out for meetings and conferences.  Set on the River Spree, the building was one of the old water pumping stations of Berlin.

While similar in vocabulary to Soul Project (seen at DDF 09), Shock takes place onstage, on a white floor, and is set to Requiems by Mozart and Vivaldi as well as Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender”.  This piece, for an all male cast, is structured into duets which appear highly competitive and somewhat aggressive.  Even from the more standard point of view of a seated audience, in contrast to walking among the dancers as we did for Soul Project, their energy is palpable.

*Shock was not a Tanz im August presentation.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day and I couldn’t resist taking a boat ride on the River Spree.  Undeniably for the tourist, it nonetheless offered a new perspective on the city.

A somewhat different view of the Bode Museum.

The Akademie der Kunste is semi-hidden in the Tiergarten, a large and lush garden in the middle of the city.  Accords, a piece by Thomas Hauert, a Swiss choreographer based in Brussels, was presented in the Akademie’s theatre.  In this work, set to a wide-ranging musical collage, the highly skilled cast of seven dancers follows a score of improvisational tasks, primarily focused on following the leader.  In duets and with the full cast, the dancers try to keep up with whomever leads for a particular period of time.  The results are often comical, occasionally inspired and wholly delightful.

There was much more work to be seen in the following days, including The Song by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and this summer’s festival favourite, the Spanish flamenco dancer Israel Galvan.   But Dublin, and other festivals beyond, called.  Hopefully, I’ll be back in Berlin before another ten years go by.

Laurie will be attending the 14th meeting of the Aerowaves network in Vilnius, the European Capital of Culture, this week (the hotel she’s staying at has guaranteed her “an Irish welcoming smile”!!) in order to take part in the assessment of over 300 applications from promising young companies and choreographers across Europe who are seeking to tour abroad.  The chosen artists will then be invited by the partners to perform in their cities.

For the first time this year, approximately 80 performances took place beyond London in Moscow, Oslo, Tallinn, Vilnius, Copenhagen, Dublin (as part of Absolut Fringe), Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Prague, Poznan, Warsaw, Zurich, Lausanne, Bassano del Grappa, Rome, Porto, Limassol, Osijek and Zagreb. Aerowaves plans to extend the number of opportunities in 2010. This expansion of Aerowaves performances is a development that provides a European network without precedent in dance.

Watch this space for news of whom we’ll be inviting to Dublin for DDF 2010!

Dublin Dance Festival had its first event for Friends on Friday, October 2. The Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival kindly treated DDF’s Friends as if we were their own so that we could experience the phenomenon that is DV8.

To Be Straight With You proved a powerful, often violent and beautiful work – vignettes of spoken word and dance conjuring characters and events that were variously shocking, disturbing, humorous, full of fear and sometimes glimmering with hope.  The ‘In Conversation’ session that took place beforehand with Artistic Director Lloyd Newson (moderated by the omnipresent Caroline Williams) provided insight into the factual background of the work without giving too much away.  It was a great chance to see some world-class dance theatre and catch up after the summer.

If you’d like to Be Our Friend and be in the know about events like this one,
you can join here.