More rich pickings to come

Dance festival grapples with difference and inclusiveness, writes MICHAEL SEAVER

LIKE ANY well-poised match, the Dublin Dance Festival is set for a frenetic second half, with nightly premieres – sometimes two per night – all the way to next weekend. After the glamour of the Abbey shows, true aficionados know there are still plenty of rich pickings and are snapping up tickets.

At The Ark last weekend, there was a bit of scrunching-up needed on the benches to fit everybody into Cas Public’s The Ugly Ducklings’ Dancing Cabaret. The action was frenetic, zooming between a zippy screenplay version of Swan Lake, a breathless bi-lingual rendition of the story of the Ugly Duckling, beat-box numbers, a recipe for duck on a bed of leeks and lots of dance. Choreographer Hélène Blackburn showed the young audience how there is nothing wrong with being different through the many layers and cross-referencing connections.

It wasn’t the only work grappling with difference and inclusiveness during the past week: Apocrifu challenged the subjective differences in the Talmud, Bible and Koran; One Shot celebrated the African-American experience under the backdrop of Teenie Harris’s photographs of segregation in Pittsburgh; Daniel Léveillé’s dancers were bound together by unison, but separated by their nakedness; and the dancers from the Spirasi Centre for Care of Survivors of Torture quietly expressed dignity and hope in Fall and Recover.

The thread continued in the three dance films on the triple bill at the Light House Cinema. DV8’s The Cost of Living, Coiscéim’s Hit and Run and Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s Eternal, all question how environments (and ultimately society) affect the behaviour of the individual outsider.

At Dancehouse, the first Re- Presenting Ireland programme showed a tighter curatorial control than last year. Dylan Quinn gave a taster selection of existing work that reined between prop-strewn theatricality to pure solo movement. In Fallout, he played a sports commentator welcoming the viewers to a real rather than metaphoric battle. Part of an evening-length show, it delves into the objectification of violence in our society, not just in war-time but in the Saturday night mayhem reflected in Arctic Monkey’s Dancing Shoes. Witty yet sharp, the extracts from Fallout gelled together into a complete whole, unlike Quinn’s second work, Bonus Tracks. A series of disparate solos, they were performed with grace and strength but felt disjointed within the context of the presentation, like DVD add-ons.

Rex Levitates’ Getting Lost deliberately bombarded the audience with relentless movement – excellently performed by Ashley Chen and Katherine O’Malley – and asked how we process such information overload. Set to the relentless Lick, by Bang on a Can’s Julia Wolfe, choreographer Liz Roche deliberately inserts easy-to-register gestures, like wiping dust off arms and torso or shrugging shoulders, and challenges the viewer to look beyond the obvious in search of truth.

Junk Ensemble’s Drinking Dust, one of the hits of last year’s Dublin Fringe Festival and winner of the Culture Ireland Touring Award, is already on the road playing in more orthodox surroundings than its original site-specific setting. Much of the original’s wonderful elusiveness was retained in the low-tech presentation at Dancehouse, but unfortunately, the multiple layers of the full production were lost.

Those unable to get tickets for shows can follow Duncan Keegan’s musings on the festival at www.dublindancefestival.blog spot.com. Dublin Dance Festival continues until May 23;

www.dublindancefestival.ie.