Opening night of the festival! Emma Martin Dance's 'Tundra' at the Beckett Theatre

Waiting rooms, lifts, lobbies... What do they have in common? All are characterised by stalled time, a purgatory of doing nothing. But what’s so bad about doing nothing, anyway? Perhaps it’s because, with nothing to occupy it, the mind turns inwards; self-analysis can be a source of great discomfort.

The tenth Dublin Dance Festival opened last night with Emma Martin Dance’s ‘Tundra’, a deeply sinister rendering of a state of stasis. Martin has a keen sense for a dramatic image and her co-designed set (conjured in collaboration with Sarah Jane Shiels) and soundscape (courtesy of Nick Roth and Francesco Turrisi) speak purgatory.

The set is minimal, echoing, and highly stylised (lined wallpaper from an indeterminate decade, understated leather furniture, plain wooden table), rendering the space timeless and without location. Flickering lights and a consistent, background hum of thin strings and white noise build menace. Snatches of melody fade in and out of earshot. Hints of a vast, freezing, featureless exterior are given by the sound of whistling wind and the muffling fur coats the four main performers are wearing when they enter. A featureless room, the only diversions on offer are those two pillars of marking empty time: drinking and smoking.

Choreographer Emma Martin wanted to picture heaven and hell as mental states rather than metaphysical realms, and the microcosm world she creates places her performers in enforced navel-gazing, sometimes collective, sometimes in isolation. The movement is by turns twitchily convulsive and fiercely defiant. In a solo, performer Justine Cooper slithers, twists, and arches backwards across the space, seemingly involuntarily, perhaps prompted by her own internal anguish or perhaps at the hands of the shadowy figure (played by actor Raymond Keane) who keeps hanging about in the background.

Later, the petite dynamo that is Oona Doherty pummels the floor and the air with windmilling limbs, punctuating her Cossack-like whirling with sharp isolations of shoulder and hip. Where Cooper’s movement seems to communicate confusion and pain, Doherty’s speaks determination - the will to battle through difficulty.

But what of the shadowy figure? He’s there, and he isn’t. He inhabits the same space as the performers, but he doesn’t seem subject to the same rules as they are. Mostly, he looks on impassively, languidly smoking a cigarette, a cigarette that is at moments lit in tandem with Cooper’s. He’s an implied puppet-master, one of the many rule-breaking presences in the piece that tap into the surreal.

A loose arrangement of elements, ‘Tundra’ flips between the quietly menacing, and the starkly absurd. As the performers battle through their enforced self-reflection, they offer the same possibility for contemplation to the audience, supplying a rich tapestry of references and images to prompt associations. It’s a very stylish, very personalised purgatory, made public.

Words: Rachel Donnelly (@racklette)

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