The Irish Times writers review the latest from the Galway Arts Festival
Circa
Festival Big Top, Galway
There comes a moment, about midway through this wonderful display from the exceptional Australian group, Circa, when the circus feats momentarily stop, the music subsides and the audience can finally, gratefully, applaud. The opportunity comes as a huge relief: there's only so much pent up appreciation an audience can bear.
This is typical of director Yaron Lifschitz's work with his four gifted performers, who deny themselves the easy gratification of a "tah-dah" moment. Instead, they weave their considerable skills into the seamless creation of something more than a series of "tricks", drawing enthralling moments from a mood piece, placing routines within the mist of narrative. It's not that they make it look easy. From the moment Chelsea McGuffin contorts her body into a circle and her partner propels her spinning into the air, then slips her coiled body onto his own like a ring on a finger, one quickly abandons all thoughts of trying this at home. The gesture is not simply there to awe. McGuffin first arrives to the stage in perilously high stilettos, and, much like the company's previous festival appearance with last year's excellent The Space Between, beyond the gasp-inducing springs and somersaults there is a choreographed dance of trust and suspicion, aggressive throws and caring catches, which tell you everything you need to know about gender relations. After the hoopla manoeuvre, McGuffin repays the favour by walking up her partner's back. Even without the heels, it's a powerful image.
If Circa turn acrobatics into a rich new grammar of performance, they also make their floor a canvas. Video projections spill light and patterns upon its surface, by turns transporting the performers into a galaxy of stars, or restricting our focus to just the careful dance of a performer's fingers.
That shift, from a universal expanse to an individual gesture, is the guiding theme of By The Light, in which group acrobatics from David Carberry, Darcy Grant and James Kingford-Smith create towers towards the heavens, but yield to solo pieces of aching fragility.
Lifschitz may take the emotional bombast of Sigur Rós to suffuse one group sequence with unbridled passion, but his use of glitchy electronica better suits the imagery of bodies at startling angles, while the haunting use of Leonard Cohen adds stark poignancy to an abandoned McGuffin, teetering on pointe, alone in the universe. As circus, it is not exactly death defying, but as an experience it is resolutely life affirming, moving us not with the traditional language of circus, dance or theatre but instead creating a poetry in motion. Until Sunday.
PETER CRAWLEY
Tania Pérez-Salas
Black Box Theatre, Galway
Middle of the road isn't what you expect to get at Galway Arts Festival, so Compania De Danza's three highly-glossy dances by Mexican choreographer Tania Pérez-Salas stand out within the festival's grittier offerings. The show might have glistened, but behind the sheen was some pretty insipid choreography, a non-nourishing blend of neo-classicism and contemporary moves. It's a shame, because throughout the evening the 10 dancers were outstanding, fully committed to whatever movement material they were dealt.
Pérez-Salas seems to value the immediate impact of the image above the movement. In The Hours, described as an impressionist tableau on the nature of femininity, some visual moments stood out, like a woman held by a dancer behind a red cloth who appeared to be floating, or a tableau of monochrome projections for three women suspended on ropes. But too often the choreography got lost in the rush to create impressive images.
The constant blackouts that set these images up didn't help, nor did the adherence to the timings of the short pieces by Vivaldi and Lully, which constantly interrupted the movement's sense of flow.
Anabiosis set out to differentiate love and eroticism, as outlined in Octavio Paz's book The Double Flame. Here, the choreography had more meat. Sweeping arms and lunging legs were dynamic, but still retained an expressive softness as they followed unpredictable patterns that turned in on themselves or spun out into new ideas. But predictability prevailed in the vocabulary: the electronics of composer Dave Seeman inspired lustful antics, while the softly-lit neo-classical partnering to Handel and Bach depicted spiritual love.
After the interval, Waters of Forgetfulness was danced on a waterlogged stage and drew on the elemental qualities of water, inspired by outspoken philosopher Ivan Illich's book H2O, The Waters of Forgetfulness. The water might have been literally centre-stage, but its power of motivation seemed restricted with quite a lot of snapped-back heads that set arcs of water flying and swinging legs that sloshed from side to side.
Ultimately these three soft-focus works might have been open-ended and metaphoric, but the visual seduction didn't quite compensate for the staid choreography.
MICHAEL SEAVER
