Company Willi Dorner Town Hall, GalwayTurgid programme notes with promises of "a suppositious attempt at transferring the analytical framework of structural linguistics into dance" caused uneasiness before lights went up on Austrian Willi Dorner's threeseconds.
First impressions were less glossy thesis and more photocopied handout, as three dancers (Ingrid Reisetbauer, Kordula Fritze and Matthew Smith) sat in street clothes at the side of a bare stage, wings removed to expose ladders and other everyday objects stacked against walls. Video images, taped vocal utterances and snippets of movement twitch to life as the building blocks are introduced.
Dorner applies onomatopoeia to movement, so just like the sound of a word reflecting its meaning, he questions how an individual movement reflects meaning in a dance. And then there is how it is said: do we shout "I love you" or whisper "ouch"? Our eyes create a dialogue in the space between bodies, just as our ears construct a conversation from individual voices in separate speakers.
But there is nothing created, only impressions. Dancers merely coexist on stage, never touching, as upright bodies skip and walk, heads occasionally bobbing to the side and elbows jutting out. We are asked to create our own meaning from the movement fragments, on their own and in relationship to the other stage elements.
The cerebral demands are hard going, but video images of stick figures playing football and brushing teeth to an obtusely academic voiceover about meaning suggests that Dorner sees more truth in everyday life than learned tomes.
The duet no credits had a similar vocabulary, but these movements seemed to have been marinated as the flavour was more personable and poignant. Still not touching, the performers nevertheless respond to each other, jogging on the spot before taking off on diagonal lines or falling to the floor.
In this barren, almost Beckettian world, the smallest interaction is emotionally magnified, so while he might struggle with the language of dance Dormer never loses sight of its ability to communicate. - Michael Seaver
Ulster Orchestra - Vladimir Spivakov Waterfront Hall, Belfast
Mozart - Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. Symphony No 29. Tchaikovsky - Symphony No 6 'Pathétique'
Seldom have we heard a performance of the Pathétique which struck such a convincing balance between feeling and purity of style, or which came closer to that fusion of objectivity and intensity which we associate with Russian performances of Tchaikovsky.
Textures were clear and nuances carefully weighted, and if one wasn't entirely convinced by Spivakov's individual phrasing of the opening theme of the last movement, one had to respect the care and conviction which went into the performance.
In the Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola Spivakov combined the roles of conductor and violinist in a near-ideal account, warm, spirited and expressive. The Waterfront Hall is not a friendly venue for solo strings, however, and although Cora Venus Lunny's tone was beautiful in itself, the viola was subdued by comparison with the violin.
A favourite with student and amateur orchestras, Mozart's Symphony No 29 is probably played more often nowadays than his other symphonies. But how well? As seems to be the rule nowadays, Spivakov took the opening Allegro moderato at a brisk allegro. He managed to make the result seem less mechanical than in most modern performances, but the playing was not particularly poised. In the third movement there was a sharp difference of tempo between the sprightly minuet and the expansive trio, separated, again as is the rule, by an awkward pause.
Only the finale came off, horns well to the fore in the coda and the dynamics carefully graded to build the work to an exciting conclusion. - Dermot Gault
