ESB Dublin Fringe Festival

Irish Times critics review some of the events from the Fringe

Daniel Figgis' Tamper *** 
Marley Park

Composer, musician and monumental installation artist Daniel Figgis may not quite "disappear" within a site-specific performance entitled Daniel Figgis' Tamper.

But if his self-effacement hits a couple of innocent hiccups (such as being raised, Christ-like, 40 feet into the air on an enormous platform), still there is enough strange beauty billowing in azure mists and flickering across mutating projections in which to lose ourselves.

With musicians surrounding the garden, isolated in translucent metallic tepees, the performance allows for a personal symphony, constructed by our unique paths between caged instrumentalists and illuminated trees.

The experience is less radical though.

The dynamics and warmth of Figgis' electronic chamber music really do need a chamber, while the façade of Tamplin's House is not a willing canvas for towering images of distorted faces and trapped wasps.

The title says it all: Figgis tampers with his environment, asking it to change forever.

The environment politely declines.

Peter Crawley

Knot Smart ***
Curved Street

Ken Fanning, founder member of the Belfast-based company, Tumble Circus, can, as proficiently as anybody else I've seen, climb a rope to a precarious height, twist coils about himself and slide precipitously back to the pavement.

He has a pleasant, easy-going manner and - if the evidence of his sensitive handling of a (not-so-sober) heckler on Thursday afternoon is any measure - is skilled in the difficult art of people management.

All that said, Knot Smart, a free show outside the crumbling remains of Temple Bar's Arthouse, is, the element of danger aside, no more remarkable than many busking performances.

Ken plays bad music on an old record player.

He chats up the girls. He climbs the rope. He slides back down again.

Such acrobatics are, like snake-charming and bear-baiting, difficult to do well, but are, like those pursuits, perhaps not ideally suited for public entertainment outside eastern bazaars.

Runs until September 25th.

Donald Clarke

Ignition - programme 2 ****

In a night of same sex duets it was the unadvertised An dá thrá by Fearghus Ó Conchúir's that impressed at the second Ignitions programme. Ó Conchúir and fellow dancer Fredrik Persson maintained physical and psychic individuality through their movements, while still charging the space between their bodies.

Megan and Jessica Kennedy's Watch Her Disappear felt less tangible, and although the conceptual premise of identical twins examining schizophrenia was promising, its physical resolution was disappointing.

Ostriches by Dansateliers Rotterdam and Keren Levi was more elusive. Video monitors projected faces that were hidden in the live duet by trailing long hair in a euro-dance kind of way.

And although the resulting "pure physical expression" was restricted by the task of face-hiding, it was a quirky, if limited, work.

Michael Seaver