Review: Here & Now

Here & Now Project Arts Centre HHH

Three years ago, Veronica Dyas walked away from it all. The owner of a terrace house in Ballyfermot, a mortgage holder in arrears, she was already like a pilgrim on a trail, asking how we got to this point, where we may go from here.

While preparing to hand over her keys, she set off to walk the Camino de Santiago, less as penance than as a way of rediscovering home. So begins a personal journey with a political context, in which Dyas lets her memory guide her from childhood recollections of the homeless through an almost somnambulant entry into the property market and eventually a decision to divest herself of earthly possessions. This is no small gesture; Dyas is an obsessive collector of documents and details who can now fit her life in a rucksack. Through it all, her documentarian methods sketch a society’s obsession with property, in which everyone was encouraged to own their own home – an ambition, she suggests, in excess of needs.

You might wonder if there’s a similar discrepancy between Project’s large performance space and such an intimate show. Dyas occupies the stage through the day, though, inviting people through an emulative trail of art installations, while her evening performance exploits her sense of exposure. Dyas, whose extraordinary In My Bed was a confessional about overcoming sexual trauma, conveys a sensitive soul behind a tough shell, speaking economical words of testimony and therapy. She is keen, though, to map her own experiences upon a much broader landscape, shifting between micro and macro perspectives.

It isn’t easy: she is most affecting and emblematic in swift and vivid storytelling details – a homeless man who charmed the St James’s nurses, an apparition glimpsed on the trail – but when the cynical voices of the Anglo tapes appear, for instance, the connection to wider societal betrayal becomes too strained. Dyas does adopt one cynical phrase for a better purpose, though: “If we stay in their language nothing will happen.” In another performer’s hands, that may sound glib, but Dyas is genuinely searching for something to believe in. Even her new mantra, “love, abundance and joy”, has been hard-earned, each word redefined.