Post-punk domination

GALWAY ARTS FESTIVAL REVIEWSof Michael Clark Companyin the Black Box and Palace at the Endat the Town Hall

Michael Clark Company

Black Box Theatre

The growing audience for contemporary dance has been well served by the Galway Arts Festival in recent years. And this year, the festival programme continues to deliver with two new creations from controversial Scottish choreographer Michael Clark.

The shorter of the two pieces, Swan Lack, comes first. A kind of post-modern homage to Tchaikovsky's original ballet of 1877, this work offers nothing of the narrative of its inspiration.

In an empty space, with nothing but a screen for projections in the background, Swan Lackbegins with the words "The End" flashed up on screen. This principal of construction – running things backwards and inverted – recurs in the two works, which received their premiere last month at the Venice Biennale.

In Clark’s vision, man is presented as machine. Jolting, mechanical gestures dominate the movements of the eight dancers, all of whom are clad in blue, except for the two “swans” that appear in white. Flourishes of classical ballet suggest themselves from time to time, evidence of Clark’s classical training. But on the whole it is the choreographer’s post-punk influences that dominate, amid the austere, electronic soundscapes and building hypnotic intensity of the piece.

In the second and more successful work, Thank U Ma'am, the music is again at the centre of Clark's creation. This time, however, it is Iggy Pop and David Bowie who receive the homage.

To this soundtrack of 1970s rock excess, the dancers (including Clark himself) create a futuristic world of emotionless clones. Stiff-limbed mannequins are reminiscent of something from movies like Blade Runneror Metropolis.These androgynous aliens are overwhelmed by the power of Bowie's original performance, however. Particularly when he is projected performing Heroeson the backdrop – the dancers are almost incidental in the face of the great rock icon's looming, on-screen presence.

Hampered by the problem of too much bass on the sound mix, causing parts of the Black Box Theatre to rumble, Thank U Ma'amdisplayed Clark's more settled, less iconoclastic side as a choreographer.

The only nod to his earlier, shock-soliciting work was in the three naked dancers that appeared briefly, performing what may be described as a buttocks ballet of posterior wiggling.

But that was merely a brief interjection in what was a cold dance from some futuristic, totalitarian state, where cloned athletes have been stripped of all individuality and humour. Something the seasoned Galway audience met with warm, if less than ecstatic, applause. IAN KILROY

Runs until tomorrow

Palace of the End

Town Hall, Galway

In recent years, the Galway Arts Festival has shown a commitment to programming political theatre, giving us dramas about apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the impact of racism on the US, and so on.

Those were all important plays, but when they’re considered together, some disconcerting patterns emerge. Political theatre usually aims to stimulate the intellect, but those works instead provoked an emotional response, usually by dramatising an atrocity committed upon the body of a woman.

And, rather than challenging expectations, they tended to confirm them, allowing the audience to concur – perhaps a little complacently – with political propositions that are almost impossible to disagree with. Judith Thompson's Palace of the Endlargely follows this formula, presenting three monologues about the invasion of Iraq. The first represents Lynndie England, the US soldier who became infamous for her abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: the second imagines the final moments of David Kelly, who committed suicide after he revealed the truth about the British government's "sexed-up" dossier about weapons of mass destruction. The performances in these roles by Kellie Bright and Robert Demeger are superb, but I worried about Thompson's attribution of "imagined" opinions to these real people.

The action culminates with a monologue by an Iraqi woman (Eve Polycarpou) who was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Implying that the US invasion replaced one set of sadists with another, the character recounts a story that is extremely difficult to listen to, yet impossible to ignore. Polycarpou’s performance is astonishingly good – but we are, once again, watching a play that enacts its politics through the suffering of a woman.

Leaving the theatre, I found myself asking a question that's also raised in the play: what's the point in staging appalling acts for the sake of entertainment? Thompson says little about Iraq that is new or challenging; instead, she allows us to bear witness to three lives that were destroyed by the Gulf Wars. There is value in her demand that we consider our willingness to accept the intolerable. But I wonder, given the subject matter, if she's asking enough of her audience? Runs until tomorrow. PATRICK LONERGAN

Galway arts Festival runs until July 26. See galwayartsfestival.com