Art comes alive in all shapes and forms at the Project

The programme note for The Sky Chair spells out what it is not: a play, a performance, an opera, an installation, an interpretation. In the event, it comes closest to being a species of music theatre, though it holds back from becoming fully engaged with the form, and choreography is its weakest point. It's probably best to view it as a snapshot of an evolving collaboration between visual artist Alice Maher and composer Trevor Knight.

It is essentially a series of images, all of them striking and most of them recognisably related to the body of Maher's concerns to date, with their allusions to fairy tale and myth. The Sky Chair is a perch atop a pole, occupied by an androgynous, regal figure (Austin McQuinn), who gazed impassively over the audience and whose periodic illumination punctuated each of the several episodes described below.

The best of these featured Catherine Walsh, as a sorrowful Leda, dressed in a plain shift, dragging the glowing white body of a swan through the auditorium and criss-crossing the performance area. Her spirit revived as she joined in a swelling chant, which reached a deafening crescendo before dying abruptly.

Having devised the images and their musical colour, Maher and Knight seemed uncertain as to how to connect and animate them, and the momentum of each new image was allowed to gradually run down, with the occasional recourse to crashes and bangs to keep us on our toes. A sequence, with references to Rapunzel and the Minotaur, in which a man on all fours (Vinnie McCabe) dragged an enormous plait across the performance space and then slowly worked his way back along it, is typical in this regard: a vivid, engaging image succumbing to dramatic predictability. But these shortcomings point up the areas which need attention and The Sky Chair was in the end promising rather than disappointing, with one or two flashes of excellence.