Suil Eile (The Other Eye), performed yesterday by Fluxusdance at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD, is undoubtedly Cathy O'Kennedy's best choreography to date. It is brilliantly danced by Simone Litchfield, recreating her own recent pregnancy in exciting movement, the weight always back on the heels, as it must be during pregnancy.
Donal Lunny's Coinnleach Ghlas an Fhomhair, David Byrne's The Moment of Conception and Walking on Water, as well as Requiem for a Dream were perfect accompaniment for the different sections, while the biblical story of Mary and Elizabeth, as told by a child in the recording Give Up Your Aul Sins, resulted in the usual hilarity, if distracting somewhat from the danced version.
The myths of pregnancy are also covered, as when Sinead McKenna's lighting reveals the stage walls lined with cabbages, from under the leaves of which - children were told - new-born babies emerged. The cabbages also doubled as babies in the arms of student actors Lisa Lambe and Ruth Negga, though I found their dialogue a distraction from the fine dancing of Litchfield, Lucy Dundon and Jennifer Fleenor.
I also found the back projection unnecessary, the movement being so expressive it needed no verbal comment, though no doubt intended to cover the strapping-on of harnesses, lowered on five "umbilical cords", enabling them, to reproduce the babies' movements in the womb. Nor did I feel five protuberances containing lights strapped to the performers' stomachs were required, the choreography, based also on O'Kennedy's memories of her own pregnancy, conveying it all.
In the effective final sequence, set to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the student actors showed definite promise as dancers, though their frantic running around the perimeter of the action again tended to distract. The piece climaxed with a symbolic shower of "blood", representing the moment of birth itself. A fine piece indeed.