It comes as a shock to see dancers dropping each other onto the floor with an unceremonious thud. The reluctance of the three members of the Reunion Islands' dance company, Compagnie Yun Chane, to support, lift and catch each other added to the cumulative sense of cruelty and threatened violence in Yun Chane's intense hour-long work, Couleurs De Femmes (Project @ the Mint, ended Saturday). With hands and feets turned inwards, three women create images of entrapment and suffering, clasping their breasts and groins with clawing movements, their interaction more akin to wrestling than pas des deux. In a blend of folk traditions and contemporary idiom that stretched the vocabulary of dance, the movements had an arresting angularity and harshness, communicating a sense of human isolation and vulnerability, while also evoking the animal world and the evolutionary chain.
At times the dancers were creatures attempting to emerge from the chrysalis and take flight, in vain, and in the final, spellbinding sequence they battered themselves against three corrugated metal sheets, arms flailing, like insects trapped in a bottle, writhing and gasping until no life remained. Against a soundtrack of tribal percussion and oratorio, this was contemporary dance at its most unremittingly bleak - and riveting.
It seems a natural progression, to add a live musical score to Yeats's lyrical tragedy, Purgatory, a dense, highly symbolic work in which an old man revisits his violent past and re-enacts it in memory (RHA Downstairs, ended on Sunday). Beautifully staged by Michael McCaffrey and with a score that mixed traditional and contemporary motifs, Michael Scott's new opera version interwove speech and singing, embodying Yeats's fascination with ritual without being slavishly reverential to his ideas.
Derek Chapman, Nicholas Folwell, Cynthia Buchan and John Matthews commanded our attention as the doomed characters, in costumes sumptuously designed by Synan O'Mahony. With a bare tree and a single black picture frame denoting the Big House, a disc of mirror-glass drawing our eye into an imaginative space behind the action of the play, and lighting that deepened from tones of azure to violet, this was a memorably coherent fusion of direction and design, which was almost too rich to absorb in one performance. Unfortunately, there were only four in total; let's hope it will be revived soon.
