National Gallery, Dublin

With their vibrantly experimental

Motion of the Heart

, the Dublin-based early music ensemble eX creatively subvert a 17th-century genre, the courtly masque.

They’ve turned this relic of royal image-making into a four-sided study of the human heart that glorifies its romantic, anatomical, sacred and aesthetic aspects.

As in the masques of old, there’s a free juxtaposition of song, dance, spoken word and instrumental music. It’s put together with a magpie’s eye for variety by eX’s joint artistic director, Eric Fraad, in collaboration with author Louisa Young.

There are sumptuous period costumes by Alessio Rosati, and a consort of viols is under the direction of continuo sage Erin Headley.

Caitríona O’Leary, the other half of eX’s artistic direction, contributes solo songs in Irish and English, and adds her mild Celtic mezzo to snippets of early Italian opera, Spanish polyphony and a French baroque litany.

Tenor Ian Honeyman and soprano Catrine Kirkman make more strongly characterised contributions as the two principals in a tantalising extract from Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo. Dancers Jessica Kennedy and Áine Stapleton gracefully punctuate the proceedings in allegorical representation of Reason and Passion.

But what’s this? The minstrelsy and madrigal singing are twice put on hold for what seem like early rounds in a blues-singers’ look-alike competition.

Posing respectively as Hank Williams and Janis Joplin, Harvey Brough and Karen Cowley barge in with tribute renditions of Cold Cold Heartand Piece of My Heart– both songs retro-fitted with viol consort accompaniments.

There’s time-travelling too from actor Jim Roche, who in two near-melodramatic recitations personifies first Oscar Wilde and then the 17th-century physician Sir William Harvey.

It’s with soprano Clara Sanabras’s distinctive performance of La vida callada, her own setting of words by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, that this handsomely mystifying variety show makes its most convincing excursion into modernity.