The double bill to inaugurate the 1998 season of New Works Series for Firkin Crane consists of two pieces by Michael Keegan Dolan performed by the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre. Beginning with the reproduction of Dolan's 1997 work Sunday Lunch, the programme illustrates this choreographer's contemporary feel for dance as interpreter rather than mediator. Energetic and acrobatic, the members of the company relish the various challenges to their agility and the solo opportunities are given polish and fluidity.
Confronting the domestic violence which comes from nothing more vicious than boredom, Sunday Lunch, despite the gravelled sound tracks, has the anarchic humour of a joke taken too far; music ranging from Elvis Presley to Moore's Melodies and Riverdance illustrates such textual references as priest and milkman, family dog and recalcitrant child. The spiralling patterns of dance linking these themes into a fairly coherent series of observations makes rather too much use of the furniture.
There is no furniture - barring an umbrella, later found to be essential, a hurley and a bucket - in Good People. A striking visual assertion by designer Johanna Connors could be either a lunar landscape or a skating rink and the lighting design of Stephen McManus is also compelling. The primal themes are not exactly new, but again the six dancers perform with stylistic consistency and a great sense of ensemble. Birth and defecation are mutual experiences shared to an electronic score courtesy of Denis Roche; throwing the (innocuous) contents of the latrine bucket at the audience is somewhat unusual even in modern dance, but the transformation of the moonscape into a swimming pool makes it all seem like good clean fun in the end.
Sunday Lunch/Good People continues at the Firkin Crane tonight and tomorrow night (booking: 021-507487) and then tours to the Samuel Beckett Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe from Monday to Wednesday of next week.
