THE title Just Bodies, Irish Modern Dance Theatre's all-male piece at the RHA Gallagher Gallery until Saturday, suggests a work of pure dance but, with John Scott as choreographer, it was unsurprisingly movement rather than dance.
For approximately 90 minutes without interval, the audience moved anti-clockwise around the basement of the gallery, with guaranteed seating only in the final space.
Isolated by a curtain of light, the cast entered the first space barefoot and barking sounds of wordless aggression progressed to burps and raspberry- blowing.
Then the combination of the pillared, space with Colin Mawby's Prayer for Forgiveness, sung by the National Chamber Choir, suggested cloisters as the cast began to move in unison and with something like reverence, before, as usual, subverting grace with scratching and shivering.
In the second space, action was on a table, with much self examination and struggling for supremacy while, in the third, beside banks of candles, John Gibson's arrangement of Anach Cuain combined with storm-tossed movement and a desperate-grasping of pillars to suggest men drowning, before they strangely took on animal qualities. Moving beneath a suspended card-player, past Henk Schut's installation to, the fourth space, we watched another struggle in a tent of light before the couple collapsed into a sea of plastic wrapping, only for the whole cast to surprise us by rising from the foam to ward off attack in different forms before fading into the smoke-filled distance.
This ending showed Scott at his dramatic best but Michael Barthome, Philip Connaghton, Daryn Crosbie, Jonathan Mitchell and Karl Sullivan had such poise, control and acrobatic skills as to suggest five fine dancers in search of a choreographer.