Dublin Dance Festival 2024 week two: Reviews of Carcaça, Impasse, My Body of Coming Forth by Day, Bench #3, This Is It and Night Dances

It was a rollercoaster second week of the festival, audiences responding on their feet to the raised tempo. The director’s themes of diversity, rebellion and identity continued in energetic style. Inside, outside and on screen, diverse dancemakers unleashed pain and joy, shame and determination. There were reverberations from earlier shows; folkloric steps and street dance transformed into contemporary idiom, the past finding a way to be woven through the present.

[ Dublin Dance Festival 2024 week one: Reviews of Cellule, Blkdog and 13 Tongues ]

Carcaça

Abbey Theatre

★★★★☆

This was an exhilarating start to the second week of Dublin Dance Festival. Combining a mix of dance styles and live music to tell his story, Marco da Silva Ferreira brought his terrific ensemble of 10 dancers backwards and forwards in time, from Portugal’s shameful past of colonisation and slavery through the recent revolutionary era to the present day. He encapsulated the capoeira, a dance form, born out of Brazil’s slave culture, that has influenced hip hop, break dance and other street styles. The percussionist João Pais Filipe and the electronic musician Luis Pestana were superb and vital partners to the highly energetic melding of old and new. Da Silva also drew on the motif of a local folkloric dancing – one whose fast, deft, ankle-twisting steps were not a kilometre away from the twisty footwork of an Irish jig. There was deftness and imagination in the visual patterns the dancers created, whether in the precise symmetry of almost military processions or when their arms shaped and reshaped their revolutionary carnation-pink boleros above their heads and around their shoulders, evoking political banners and scarves, flags or head-borne baskets of bread. Their voices called out in an anthem: the fight must continue; the walls must come down.

Impasse

Project Upstairs

★★★★☆

Walls are more challenging to break down when you seem powerless, and memories are too painful. The emerging choreographer and dancer Mufutau Yusuf, in Impasse, his compelling, impressive premiere, was looking at the representation of the black body, as slave, as migrant, as subject of discrimination. The opening image was of two Beckett-like figures lost in a blank landscape, pulling a large bag. It may have been full of material possessions, but it was also the baggage of trauma, loss, shame and anger, all locked up and weighing them down. Yusuf and Lucas Katangila used their bodies so expressively and eloquently as they tensed with recollection. Tom Lane and Mick Donohoe’s sound score brilliantly suggested crackling tinder each time a shoulder shifted or a hand unfurled. In a longer sequence, the two dancers walked forwards and backwards with unfaltering rhythm, one propelling himself with a tiny flick, the other with heels lifting. It was hypnotic. A sudden random knee jerk, a playful high kick, a swivelled hip suggested that release and hope might be on the horizon. The wall might become a part of their story, a safe place to display that bag now transformed into a multicoloured quilt of a life in freedom.

[ Impasse choreographer Mufutau Yusuf: ‘I can’t have fixed ideas. Difference often opens up into something completely better than I imagined’ ]

My Body of Coming Forth by Day

Project Upstairs

★★★★☆

Memories can be revisited in other ways, as Olivier Dubois, the French dancer and provocative avant-garde choreographer, exhibited so masterfully. Although he had a career with his own company, and worked and danced with the modern ballet maestro William Forsyth, with Ballet Preljocaj and with the more provocative Belgian artist Jan Fabre, here he was on a solo run – and in showman mode, cajoling and game-playing with the audience, cigarette and glass in hand. Audience members were cued to open envelopes containing requests for performance excerpts from his memory bank of a life of dance; a body harbouring thousands of gestures, movements and experiences. Now a little bulkier, his breathing slower, he was respectful and still in charge. As the notes of Debussy filled the air, it seemed impossible, surreal even. He was re-creating his own re-creation, from back in 2008, of Nijinsky’s immortal L’Aprés-midi d’un Faune. It was an awkward moment of personal history. It was graceful, human and moving. He was keeping his identity as a dancer.

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Bench #3

Grand Canal Dock

★★★★☆

By contrast, no sound and fury apart from the wind whipping around the tall red sculptural poles of Grand Canal Dock, the setting for the latest in CoisCéim’s Bench series, an inspired collaboration with Waterways Ireland, this time featuring the dancer and choreographer Sibéal Davitt. Perched on a metallic cube that would not have looked out of place in a strobe-lit club, Davitt arched and stretched over the cube, as though resting on a rock by the shore, her movements first rippling with the water’s motion or bobbing in acknowledgment of the floating gulls. Then, to strains of perfectly pitched fiddle music, her body shifted a gear and, loose-limbed and barefoot, still on her rock, an exquisite free-form sean-nós dance began, so relaxed and yet invisibly controlled.

Originate Showcase

Project Cube

★★★★☆

The showcase of work in development is a glimpse forward. Luke Murphy, an associate artist of the festival, will deliver a new work for the festival in 2025. Scorched Earth is already beginning to look fertile, and with Katie Davenport’s design, this part-homage to John B Keane’s The Field could be an intriguing, visceral exploration. Amir Sabra’s infectious Within This Party was a calling card for this Limerick-based young dancemaker from Palestine, fusing folkloric and street dance.

This Is It

IFI

★★★★☆

Joan Davis, the veteran dancer and pioneer of contemporary dance in Ireland, says, with conviction, “I was a dancer, and I still am.” The words are spoken as part of Laura Murphy’s textured, understated This Is It: 8 Portraits, a film premiering as part of the dance festival. Eight Irish women dancers and performers are interviewed or talked about, off camera, about what it is they do and why, analysing and reflecting on immersiveness, process, discipline, improvisation and dedication.

This Is It will also be performed at Cork Midsummer Festival

Night Dances

Abbey Theatre

★★★★☆

A badge from a background festival show video proclaimed “Music makes me high!” Maybe the wearer had been to Night Dances, a reprise of Emma Martin/United Fall’s pulsating Dublin Theatre Festival production of 2021, now framed to a stripped-back Abbey stage and about to go on tour. It was a rave and a spectacle, performers dancing for us and for themselves, teen dancers turning cartwheels, five skilful dancers in uninhibited motion, club dancing or private dancing, all pumping and soaring through Daniel Fox’s addictive high-volume rhythm and beats that thrummed through both dancers and audience.

Night Dances will also be performed at Cork Midsummer Festival

[ Night Dances at Dublin Theatre Festival 2021: Raucous, loud and sweaty, this is a thrilling hour of relentless dancing and music ]