DTF review | Dancehall: Living to dance another day

Dancehall

Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin

***

How, Yeats wondered, can we know the dancer from the dance? It’s a good line, and an even better question. This new piece from choreographer Emma Martin, composer Andrew Hamilton, five dancers and three musicians sets out to explore the relationship between the dancer and the dancehall: the tension between what happens inside the body in response to musical stimuli, and what society imposes from the outside by way of convention and control.

Dancehall begins with the music, and the music at the beginning is skeletal: a chord on an electronic keyboard, held until it pulses with unexpected undertones; a heartbeat from the drum; flashes of cello so brief you wonder if you've imagined them. A dancer whose ultra-slow-motion movements recall the controlled fluidity of tai chi.

There follows an hour of meditative intensity. Eruptions of energy create brief scenarios that flare, then dissolve. A drunken circle joins hands to sway at a wedding party. A group of soldiers proceeds at a brisk, perfectly co-ordinated trot. Bodies shape up to each other in every conceivable way: to love, to fight, to dominate, to celebrate.

Time and again, the dancers hit the floor: often literally, but always beautifully, with an athletic grace that combines classical and jazz gestures. No jagged edges for this show. And no matter how many times they fall, they live to bop another day.

Gradually the conceptual dancehall becomes real as huge curtains unfurl around the stage area, enclosing both performers and audience in a smoke-fugged, sparkle-filled space that might be comforting or (depending on your experiences and memories of the dance spaces of your youth) sinister. The music, meanwhile, has also fleshed out to embrace some tantalisingly song-like fragments.

It's a happy ending – of sorts. But maybe not for anyone who was drawn to Dancehall by the programme warning: "contains nudity". It does. But not so much that – unless you're lurking in the ditch, armed with an ash-plant – you'd notice.

Ends Oct 11