Fragments review: Beautiful, well-judged dance

Dublin Fringe Festival: Jessie Keenan’s choreography questions how we read movement

Dublin Fringe Festival 2018. Fragments. PR photo by Carrie Lewis, Design Jane McCormick.
Dublin Fringe Festival 2018. Fragments. PR photo by Carrie Lewis, Design Jane McCormick.

FRAGMENTS

The Complex
★ ★ ★ ★
After two years of research and work-in-progress showings, the conceptual premise for Fragments has been reduced to a distilled essence. No slam-dunk answers, either: Jessie Keenan's beautiful and well-judged dance feels like a single spun-out question about how we read and remember movement and gesture. Super 8 family footage is projected in the beginning, a reminder of her grandfather's dementia, but movement trumps theatricality throughout.

Marion Cronin, Siobhán Ní Dhuinnín and Sarah Ryan are impressively sustained in slowly unravelling recurring phrases, from obsessive clothes-tugging to lying on their backs, arms and legs floating upwards. By dancing more as three individuals than as a trio, they make moments of coalescence more satisfying, such as a shared sudden soft impulse, or by slowly aligning into a straight diagonal. Alongside the crafted choreography, Irene Buckley’s soundscape and Matt Burke’s lighting design are both restrained and supportive.

Runs until Friday, September 14th