Tag Archives: Dance

Review: Taiwan Season Online Performances 2021 – A Glimpse of Taiwan

Summerhall

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Online On-Demand

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Ai-sa sa

Tjimur Dance Theatre

“Peel away each layer
And behold what lies behind
Away it goes; tears well in your eyes
Off it falls; you can’t help but smile
Layers collapse; laughing, weeping intertwine”

At the core of Tjimur Dance Theatre’s Ai-Sa Sa is an awareness of balance, of stripping away layers to find the basic balance of things – red apple/green apple, laughter/tears, care/violence. Even in form, with its blend of filmed stage work and made-for-film scenes, Ai-sa sa holds balance at its heart.

No emotion lasts long in its portrayal on stage, and the four strong cast of performers (Ching-Hao Yang, Ljaucu Tapurakac, Tzu-En Meng, Sheng-Hsiang Chiang) flit naturally between contemporary dance, physical theatre and song. With a rapid, but not rushed, pacing, Ai-sa sa brings its audience on a colourful journey through the mercurial moods and shifting relationships of the characters on screen, deftly portraying themes of impermanence, changeability, and equilibrium.

Drawing its name from a modern Paiwan phrase, used as an interjection to laugh at your own attitude, Baru Madiljin’s exuberant work reminds its audiences to get over themselves and go with the flow – “Ai-sa sa, and shake it off!”

The Back of Beyond    

Tai Gu Tales Dance Theatre 

Another work which explores ideas of balance and equilibrium, Hsiu Wei Lin’s The Back of Beyond is an intense and absorbing work. Bringing together elements of both Eastern and Western aesthetics, choreography, ritual and spirituality, this work from Tai Gu Tales Dance Theatre composes cycles of birth, death and rebirth.

Opening with the dancers engulfed in shrouds which they will return to and cast off at several points in the performance, like chrysalides, The Back of Beyond takes a pace that is at times meditative, at others almost uncomfortably slow and at yet others, frenetic and unsettling. The company demonstrates skill and focus as an ensemble, sometimes breaking away into individual movement, but often moving as though part of a single powerful organism, lead by the heartbeat of the work’s entrancing elemental score.

Though not a work for those who like a pacy, direct narrative, The Back of Beyond (which was originally designed as an immersive live experience)is a captivating show in which you can lose yourself to the powerful choreography and the design which delves into the spaces between light and dark to mesmeric effect.

Fighters

Les Petites Choses Production

Based on a classical work of Chinese literature, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nai-Hsuan Yang’s Fighters is a light-hearted work which examines dancers’ relationships with their bodies and minds in this global time of uncertainty and isolation. Where its source text is famously lengthy and complex, Fighters is a condensed fifteen-minute work which, even though I could not understand the narration or find subtitles, is engaging and accessible.

Staged in spaces that sit between the domestic and mythic, Fighters blends hip-hop and contemporary styles to create an entertaining new depiction of heroism, which many people will recognise after the past year of pandemic-life.

Touchdown

Incandescence Dance

A dance work based on physics, which culminates in a visual art installation was always going to catch my attention, but Hao Cheng’s Touchdown went beyond that and captivated me.

Asking the core question, “How can one entity be recognised as two things at once?,” Touchdown uses a discussion of the nature and action of electrons to delve into deceptively philosophical ideas. By flipping the camera angle, Cheng and the dozens of sticks of chalk around him initially appear to be magnetically attached to ceiling, and this sets the tone for the inversions, diversions and contradictions that will be uncovered in this twenty-minute work.

From using himself as a compass to draw concentric circles, to examining the history of concepts in physics, Hao Cheng draws his mathematical background into his choreography and in doing so finds new avenues of creative exploration, which address age-old questions in innovative ways.

All performances in the Taiwan Season are available online via Summerhall as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 6th August to 29th August 2021.

The Theatre of The Everyday

Originally published on http://www.takeyourseats.ie

While I once again find myself writing a lockdown column, this month there is a glimmer of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel with the most recent government announcement which suggests theatres may reopen in June.  Though they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, is maith an t-anlann an t-ocras, good things come to those who wait…the waiting is still no fun. After months of darkened stages and empty auditorium seats, I know many of us are waiting with bated breath for the return of live theatre. Even with fantastic streamed plays, Zoom performances and other digital offerings, nothing quite matches the feeling of being present in a room with other people as a story unfurls on stage.  But, as the famous line from As You Like It goes, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” So this month, I invite you to look to the stage around us and find the theatre in everyday life.

We may not be able to come and meet those dancing feet at 42nd Street, or watch dancers pas de chat across a stage in the Dance of the Cygnets, but just step into your local supermarket and you will see a complicated new choreography that we have all learned over the past year – the Social Distancing Dance. You go to pick up a box of cornflakes, but as you do another shopper reaches for the box next to it; a quick chassé each and you have returned to your safe 2 metre distance, her by the Weetabix, you next to the Rice Krispies. Meanwhile, an unwitting corps de ballet of other shoppers steps cautiously in time with each other in their socially distanced queue at the checkouts.

Or if it’s music you’re missing, step outside your front door and hear the music that is being performed all around you. Following in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, and composers like John Cage, let the sounds around you become a performance. Imagine a dialogue between the ice-cream van’s jingle and the rattle of a train passing nearby, or between the car alarm that is wailing in the distance and the beep-beep-beep of the checkouts in a shop. Let the world’s overture entertain you as you wait for the curtain to rise in your favourite venue.

Finally, if you need some drama, look no further than the bird-feeder outside your back door. Watch the dynamic power-struggles unfold between a goldfinch and a starling over some sunflower hearts and peanuts. Act 1 opens as the goldfinch flies down and perches, ready for breakfast, but as the interloping starling swoops in, a drama to rival Ibsen or Sophocles begins. Or if you prefer a mystery like The Mousetrap, check out The Mystery of the Vanishing Parcel. You’ve been at home all day, the doorbell is working, and yet you spy the dreaded note below your letterbox – ‘We are sorry we missed you.’ You don’t know when it appeared, you never heard a thing, you can’t even remember what you ordered. As the curtain falls at the interval, the greatest mystery of our time leaves you wondering, where could the parcel be, and will it ever be seen again?

We have all been in lockdowns for longer than we care to remember; we have ordered all of the things we can order online, we have baked more banana bread than we could ever hope to eat, and we have re-watched our favourite sitcoms far too many times. But it won’t last forever – there is light at the end of the tunnel and that light will illuminate our stages again before too long. In the meantime, find the novelty in the normal, entertainment in the everyday, and let the curtain rise on the theatre of day-to-day life.

Review – Fable

Dublin Fringe

Project Arts Centre

09/09/18

Originally published on The Reviews Hub.

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Billed as “a sinister dance theatre production for young adults” in its programme, Fable is a show that more than lives up to its description. In this collection of five short dance stories, which blend elements of both street dance and contemporary dance, Human Collective trust and challenge their audience. Each of the stories in Fable explores different facets of present and near future life, presenting chilling possibilities for the continuation of humankind. In some stories, the ideas presented seem like the preserve of dystopian fiction, but others seem all too familiar, making the more dystopian ones seem plausible too. This is an interrogation of modern life that draws bleak conclusions while leaving a doorway open for hope and change.

The ensemble, made up of Matt Szczerek, Tobi Balogun, Leon Dwyer and Cristian Dirocie, is a strong blend of different, but complementary, performance styles and energies. This is particularly evident in the relatively simple but remarkably striking choreography in the third story, entitled “The Changelings of Smolensk.” Dancing with suitcases, and using them as malleable props to denote different stages of their journey, the ensemble resembles a poetic Newton’s cradle, the synchronicity of their movements suggesting a perpetual collective motion. Alongside this strong ensemble work, certain dancers stand out in solo passages, with each dancer’s individual style shining through in their performance of Szczerek’s choreography. Particularly notable was Dirocie, who has surely made a pact with gravity, or perhaps replaced his joints with springs. The flowing, electrical intensity of his performance provided an individual (but not overpowering) spark in ensemble sequences, and turned that spark into a flame in his arresting solo pieces.

The design in the piece was relatively simple, with an empty stage and pared back (but effective) lighting design by Eoin Lennon. In tandem with Lennon’s lighting design, Grzegorz Szczerek’s score created the setting within the empty space. There was also considerable use of projection, designed by Cathy Coughlan, throughout the piece. Though there were interesting elements to the video design, it often distracted from the work of the dancers on stage. This was particularly noticeable in Matt Szczerek’s solo story, where the videos of him dancing on screen drew focus from his impressive live performance on stage. There were points at which one felt the need to choose between following the story on stage or on screen; the two elements were competing rather than complimenting each other.  The live performances were strong enough to carry the thread of the piece through this, perhaps suggesting that they could have carried the meaning of the piece throughout, without on-screen additions.

Fable is a striking, accomplished piece of dance theatre that confidently trusts its young audience to understand and interrogate the world around them, and to recognise the need to change and shape the future.

Runs until 16 September 2018 | Image: Contributed

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Review – Assisted Solo

Dublin Fringe

Project Arts Centre

09/09/18

Originally published on The Reviews Hub.

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What does it mean to be solo? (Don’t say anything about the Millennium Falcon) Does it mean acting independently, or acting completely alone, or perhaps something else entirely? Philip Connaughton’s Assisted Solo examines our relationships with independence and ageing through carefully chosen anecdotes and insightful and revealing choreography that moves between the balletic and bizarre, catching the searingly human in between.

As the show opens, Philip Connaughton, Lucia Kickham and Magali Caillet dance a repeated sequence of steps, swapping patterns with each repeat. Each dancer appears to try movements on for size, to test their range of movement and expression. This sequence lays the foundation for the work that is to follow, as the dancers break away from their regimented pattern and begin to explore solo work, sometimes dancing alone, sometimes assisted by or assisting each other. Even when only one artist is dancing on stage, however, the others are still present, changing lighting states, moving around the periphery, or even simply affecting the performance with their gaze. Even the passages that are seemingly entirely ‘solo’ are influenced by the presence of others in the space, whether those others are the audience or fellow performers.

As the choreography prompts us to consider ideas of independence, and relationships between people in common spaces and situations, Connaughton’s anecdotes and the footage he includes of his mother, who suffers from dementia, bring these considerations from the theoretical to the personal. From a story about a Popeye toy to one about dealing with his mother’s problems with constipation, the stories Connaughton tells explore the same subjects as the choreography, and draw together the pain and comedy of the situations he finds himself in as he copes with his mother’s declining health.

While this is, for the most point a moving examination of Connaughton’s experience, and broader questions of independence and interdependence, there are points at which the elements don’t entirely hold together. Though the footage of his mother demonstrates great care, and the way in which it is presented on stage does the same, there are points at which it seems somewhat detached from the movement on stage – a later addition rather than an intrinsic element woven into the fabric of the performance. This detracts a little from the insights on stage, as the video footage seems more of a prop rather than the input of a fourth performer. In a way it adds an interesting new element to the questions of independence in the piece, but perhaps not in an intentional, constructive way.

In its consideration of our interactions with each other, especially in times of need, Assisted Solo raises interesting questions, most of which appear intentional, but some of which seem incidental.

Runs until 15 September 2018 | Image: Contributed

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Butterflies and Bones – Review

Originally published on The Reviews Hub

Butterflies and Bones

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

20/10/16

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In recent months, Irish stages have been awash with productions exploring 1916 and where we stand on the events of that year now, in 2016, a hundred years later. There have been productions about the Easter Rising, productions about the creation of the state we live in now, and productions about Roger Casement. As one might imagine, after nine months of this, the theme is getting worn and fewer avenues are left to be discovered. However, Butterflies and Bones: The Casement Project, created by Fearghus Ó Conchúir as part of Project Arts Centre’s 50th anniversary programme, puts paid to any such ideas of staleness. An electric and insightful work, Butterflies and Bones conveys the human behind the history with skill and passion.

Roger Casement (formerly Sir Roger Casement; he was stripped of his title before his execution for his involvement in Irish revolutionary activity, including the 1916 Rising) was a British peer, and Irish nationalist figure and all-round enigmatic historical figure. However, alongside his political life, there is his personal life. As a gay man in early 20th century Ireland, Casement had a carefully hidden portion of himself that was only later discovered in a number of diaries. Butterflies and Bones effectively reminds the audience of this; that Casement was not just a political or revolutionary figure, but a person too.

Ó Conchúir’s choreography (created in conjunction with the performers) is evocative and intense, conveying the formal public Roger Casement, and the raw, open private Casement. Introducing strong elements of each performer’s personal dance style into the performance, and then creating segments in which they adopt each others’ movements, the choreography creates a strong ensemble that portrays Roger Casement as a multi-faceted character. One of the most powerful elements of this, when combined with Alma Kelliher’s expressive sound design, comes through in the undercurrent of fear and threat portrayed almost throughout the performance. Even in moments of heady ecstasy, there is a threat lingering in the atmosphere, whether of being discovered in his republican activities or in his personal life.

Working with dance styles reminiscent of those such as Lucinda Childs’ 1970s/1980s postmodern choreography, The Casement Project takes the theme of 1916/2016 far from any danger of nostalgia or stasis and injects it with a revolutionary quality of its own. As it breaks down, reforms and plays with a tower of speakers and two large metallic cloths (the only props), this production breaks down and represents a well known historical figure in a new and insightful light. Complimenting this performance and direction style, Ciaran O’Melia’s skilful design, both in terms of lighting and set, takes the piece far from the reach of realism and into an exciting, open and productive space.

Butterflies and Bones: The Casement Project takes a well-worn topic and re-invigorates it in innovative and engaging ways. With a wealth of dramatic, political and social history to absorb and re-invent with ingenuity and fervour, this production takes a truly new approach to the story of Roger Casement and 1916.

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