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Dublin Dance Festival: Dances for Airports Rankefod
Project Cube and Space Upstairs
There are lots of obvious ways to choreograph Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Thankfully Sarah Skaggs didn't choose any of them. Dry ice billowing from the opening door of Project's small Cube space might have been the portent of blurry visual ambience to match the Eno's fuzzy musical textures.
But within the theatrical fog, choreographer Scaggs presented her physicality up close and in focus rather than hiding in the comfort zone of smoggy ambiance. That's not to say her 20 minutes of choreography was a call to complete attention, but rather a short personal meditation on daily ritual that had an undercurrent of anxiety and restlessness.
The first sight of dancer Kitt Johnson also emerged from a haze as her muscular back emerged through the darkness. Seated on the ground, facing the back wall with head bowed she offered her body as kinetic sculpture as individual muscles and bones slid around under her skin.
Rankefod is Danish for cerripide, a type of crustacean parasite like a barnacle, and Johnson captured a murky universality of evolving life-forms - human or animal - as she hovered around the stage. It was a different form of meditation than that of Skaggs: timeless and in some ways not even human.
Performing near-naked with white make-up, her slow movement might have suggested butoh, but Johnson's vision is not that dark. There are moments of real beauty - as simple as undulating hands - emerging from the abstractly shifting shapes of her body. She crawled and slid around the floor with incredible articulation, at one point an outstretched leg mirroring an outstretched arm in perfect unison.
All around Sture Ericson's electroacoustic score suggests a vast space beyond the stage while Mogens Kjempff's lighting design captures detail as well as atmosphere.
However much it appears abstract, Rankefod is touchingly resonant.
Johnson's performance suggests that even the modern human body carries the imprint of evolution, not just physically but at some deeper level.
She made a compelling case through a work whose real power lies beneath its impressively immediate exterior.
MICHAEL SEAVER
Leonard, Camerata Pacifica
NCH, Dublin
Induce a dozen and more high-ranking soloists to take time out of their busy global schedules to give chamber-music concerts in California, and you have the miracle of modern artistic organisation that is Camerata Pacifica.
Three of its members happen to be Irish: clarinettist Carol McGonnell, principal violinist Catherine Leonard, and principal flautist and founding artistic director Adrian Spence. So too is the ensemble's associate composer, Ian Wilson. Though Camerata Pacifica is now in its 19th season, this is its first international tour, taking in the wider US, Ireland and England.
Wednesday's appearance at the National Concert Hall had also been billed as a Composer's Choice concert for Wilson. Yet, owing not least to the forcible idealism of Spence's programme notes and spoken introductions, it took on wider proportions.
It was a celebration of 10 years since the Good Friday Agreement, it was the fulfilment of lofty mission statements, and it was a powerful assertion of the relevance of contemporary composition.
Above all, it was music-making of the highest quality.
The programme, which totals barely an hour's listening, is calculated less to appeal than to challenge. John Harbison's relentlessly objective Piano Quintet (1981) creates an emotional hunger that's more than satisfied by Wilson's richly subjective Messenger (1999/2006).
Originally scored for full orchestra, this four-movement violin concerto was given its first performance by Leonard in 2001. Now condensed for 13 instruments, the latest version reduces the forces, but not their intense effectiveness.
It's a memorable piece for many reasons, but especially for strongly idiomatic solo writing that places the traditional virtuosities - gliding position changes, cantilenas, trills, double stops and dazzling passages - in newly poignant surroundings.
Wilson can be optimistic that it will be more widely taken up. How many violinists will bring the solo part nearer to perfection than Leonard does is harder to predict.
ANDREW JOHNSTONE
