Fanfare and Bell

IMMA Dublin Dance Festival

With a title like Fanfare, some kind of bombastic opening to this year's Dublin Dance Festival might have been expected, but Jodi Melnick's choreography offered soft intensity rather than hard-edged pomposity. The audience was lulled even before the performance, with artist Burt Barr's preset décor featuring a soothing centrepiece of softly whirring fans that cast streaks of shadows and light while billowing gentle turbulence onstage.

Moving to IMMA from the Abbey Theatre – DDF’s traditional opening night venue – might have caused a reduction in scale and size, but it was a confident statement of intent in prioritising strong artistic visions over première night glamour: never mind the width, feel the quality.

Melnick typified this by offering a superb linear monologue that drew on a small palette of movement. Snippets, like a slowly buckling hip or a pointed finger followed by a glance, constantly reappeared in and out of sequence and were punctuated by slow walks into a different place onstage where they would be repeated. Her skilled choreographic hand was matched by her mesmeric presence onstage as she seems to go in constant search of a stable groove. When Matthew Morris joins her towards the end of the dance, they settle into a unison duet that is settling and satisfying in its eventual predictability.

By contrast, New York-based Yasuko Yokoshi’s /Bell/ is a version of the Kabuki dance Kyoganoko Musume-Dojoji, which she co-created with Tokyo-based master teacher Masumi Seyama. Purists might baulk at their collaborations where they deconstruct the choreography of classical Kabuki dance and celebrate differences in culture and artistic background, but in /Bell/ the result is a fascinatingly sustained solo.

The original depicts the evolution of a woman from youth to maturity, but this version suggests tensions between tradition and modernity with Yokoshi dressed in a costume that suggests both courtly tradition and modern streetwear.

Towards the end, she replaces the formality of the traditional wig with the dyed wildness of a more modern style, a visual transformation that contrasts with the restrained movement vocabulary, where every emotion is restrained and channelled through the quickest glance or tiniest gesture.