Dancehall Blues
CoisCéim Dance Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Since CoisCéim was founded, in the 1990s, by the choreographer David Bolger, the troupe has become one of Ireland’s most consistently ambitious dance companies, regularly touring both at home and abroad.
Its last show, Palimpsest, was a historical medley that focused on the first 100 years of the Irish Republic, managing to balance Civil War tragedy and Celtic Tiger absurdity in one seamless dance exhibition. Palimpsest premiered to widespread acclaim only six months ago, yet Bolger’s latest work feels as thematically rich a universe as its recent predecessor.
Dancehall Blues features two dancers, Stephanie Dufresne and Alex O’Neill, in an enigmatic and evolving setting. Surrounded at first by what appears to be slow-motion imagery of a 1950s dancehall, the pair emerge dressed in full-body boiler suits. The quaint environment of yesteryear evaporates, and an electro club beat squeezes the air.
A disco ball, still tethered to the ceiling, drops to the floor, and the depersonalised performers swing it like a pendulum, dividing the space and constraining the scope of their eerie, hostile movements.
A lachrymose German speaker makes proclamations about civilisation’s precarity and references the “great reset”, the controversial brainchild of the World Economic Forum, which became a meme for online conspiracy agitators at the height of the Covid pandemic. Both the unsustainable growth at which the great reset was targeted and the internet hysteria that its announcement elicited seem to provide the nutritive ground for Bolger’s dark odyssey, which transports its characters backwards in time, to the Europe of the early 20th century, before leading resignedly to the collapse of the world.
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The dancers work well together. Dufresne is a charismatic performer with the agility of a circus tumbler. O’Neill is truly propulsive: not only indefatigable, his physical control is pronounced, every movement, step, twitch and muscular contraction articulated and definitive.
CoisCéim’s incorporation of staging and theatrical devices is expertly ingenious: the disco ball is only the first prop, followed quickly by a mirror, wall-mounted chairs, scenery-shifting curtains and lighting from an external courtyard, all of which are used to great effect. Running at only 50 minutes, this show packs a punch.
Continues at CoisCéim Dance Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 21st
