Trailblazing departures challenge festival audiences

The performances at this year's Dublin Dance Festival polarised, provoked and entertained – just as they should, writes SEONA Mac RÉAMOINN

IF YOU were to feed all of the diverse images, gestures, moves, scores, and ideas from this year's Dublin Dance Festival from 24 artists and companies into an imaginary computer, the resulting cross-referenced material might indicate reams of interweavings and interconnecting themes. No doubt that is what DDF director Laurie Uprichard hoped for as she went about crafting the programme for this year's festival. Its central theme may have been taken from the poetic title of Raimond Hoghes' festival piece, Young People, Old Voices, but this was only departure point for the other parallel and underlying themes, which explored the many bodies of contemporary dance and the act of performance itself.

Coming upon and recognising references and reverberations of these layers became part of the delight of the festival and while audiences views could be divided on some performances, this at least indicated that the diversity of the audience, at mostly packed-out shows, paralleled the international choreographic diversity of the performances on offer.

Dance audiences continue to rise and the festival's RTÉ Dance on the Box quartet appears to underline a commitment to widening access to contemporary dance. These fine creative duets of dancemaker and filmmaker, performers and camera were screened both on the wide canvas of Meeting House Square and over four nights last week on RTÉ. The popular shows saw some work blazing a trail through the festival themes to heightened visual effect and exuberant physicality. Some enduring images flashed by us in stark outline or in vibrant colour; such as the bright blue dress of Jean Butler's accomplished performance in Tere O'Connor's commissioned solo Day.

Then there was the scarlet ship of ribbon that skimmed the stage before sailing aloft wrapped around two arching bodies in the opening salvo of Heidi Latsky's Gimp. This radical yet human look at dance and disability was a tender collision of those with full formed bodies and those with absent limbs, here a missing hand or arm, there an awkward, stumbling gait.

Or there was the tall figure in the long yellow coat all fidgeting and yearning movements as he waited on a railway platform in the intriguing and dislocating Double Tracksby Beppe Blankert. Or, in the festival closing show, the black lace and ruffled body of Soledad Barrio's impassioned rising crescendo, her feet flicking and furiously stamping the earth while her hands and fingers reached for the sky.

Others were subtler: the dress down sneakers and sports shirts for Yvonne Rainer's terrific RoS, an evocative and reworked experience of the riotous Paris premiere of Nijunksy and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; the rows of shoes, left on stage in a sequence of Raimund Hoghe's piece, the duet in June Ensemble's Five Ways to Drown, where one partner is attached to an IV drip; or the feeling of being submerged in the turquoise dappled waters of David Bolger and Conor Horgan's Deep End Dance, one of the Dance on the Box films.

Liz Roche, for Rex Levitates's Secondary Sources, mined the notion of instinctive movement, foraging for those old voices in her wonderfully coherent and reflective work for 10 dancers, exploring the question of how we all move and blurring the lines between audience and performers, an angle also taken in Double Tracks, where the audience are a little disoriented with the clever use of mirrors and video screens, other ways of seeing performance.

Memory, reliable and fallible, played a key role in many if not all of the choreographers' work, often using music or a familiar dance phrase to trigger new movement, intently listening to these old voices, the ones within and without. We heard the strains of Peggy Lee in Hoghe's work, the nostalgic piano rolls in David Bolger's gentle duet, Swimming with my Mother, while Stravinksy's Rite of Springmade more than one appearance. And among many gestural memories evoked was the ghost of Giselle, her human frailty haunting no less than three works; in an allusion on screen in Basso Ostinato, a vivid reworked homage by Jodi Melnick in Repairand by Carkotta Sagna's anxious, exposed solo in Ad Vitam.

A slow-moving centrepiece

Young People, Old Voices

Samuel Beckett Theatre

Raimund Hoghe's dance was the thematic centrepiece for this year's Dublin Dance Festival, but not just for obvious reasons. Yes, the title reflected the festival's embrace of older artists with young voices such as Yvonne Rainer, and Hoghe's physicality onstage – he has severe curvature of the spine – also symbolised an overall inquiry into different body types. But the three-hour Young People, Old Voiceswas also indicative of the choreography found across the festival that refused to placate the audience, but challenged the individual and society in ways that were uncompromising and extremely eloquent.

Choreography for Hoghe isn’t about demonstrating virtuosity or showing off complicated sequences and routines. He sees himself as a facilitator for a ritual that connects performers and audience.

In Young People, Old Voices, the young cast might wash their hands, play marbles or throw paper aeroplanes, but everything is performed within a calm and sometimes slow-moving setting (too slow-moving for those who chose to walk out on opening night). The wide range of music, from classical to Billie Holiday, played at a low volume throughout, reinforced this sense of ritual.

With Hoghe as a master of ceremonies, the contrast is constantly drawn between the middle-aged man with a diminutive body and the young cast. It’s a rhetoric that offers no absolutes, but disturbs the myth of the perfect body, invokes issues of cultural memory and challenges our attitude to difference.