Reviews

Irish Times writers review Exodus/Grand Junction at The Pavilion, Paul Simon at the Point and TV on the Radio at the Temple Bar Music Centre.

Exodus/Grand Junction, The Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire

In the past, choreographers Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick have reflected on estrangement from spirituality and nature within an increasingly technological society. Their premise is that although we all bear collective responsibility for these shifts, reconnection is only possible through individual, personal journeys.

Similarly the changes born through migration, the theme of their new work, Exodus, are not just physical displacements, but personal transformations. Projected images of airports, roads and cities nudge our thoughts toward journeys as we watch dancers cohabiting the stage with little sense of togetherness. Protective of personal space, their almost furtive dancing feels like a clutched suitcase containing all of their possessions. Later, when metaphorically and physically stripped, they reveal the histories behind these movements through snatches of text. Although Exodus clearly illustrates these stories and the isolation, cruelty and prejudice that can occur in migration, there is a lack of cohesiveness in the artistic statement.

Even the sense of liberation promised in the programme was unfelt. A final image of a body carried, laid to rest and buried with a handful of dust may have been beautifully striking, but felt neither redemptive nor conclusive.

Charles Linehan had a smaller palette in creating Grand Junction: two dancers, a thoughtful lighting design and Nye Parry and Julian Swales' leavening music. Dancers Karl Paquemar and Melanie Nezereau move in isolation on a soft-edged grid of nine blurry spotlights, an occasional common movement, phrase or shared glance connecting them. Physical contact occurs because paths collide rather than by choice, but later more positive impulses bring them together as the movement shifts up through the gears along with momentum-building musical changes.

Paquemar's arms encircle Nezereau from behind for a split second before he spins away, but it is enough to register and be meaningful. The fluid released movement and warm seductive glow from stage lead to Linehan's dances often being described as "soft". But Grand Junction, like his other work, is rigorously constructed and shows his confidence in letting nuanced movements and a fast visual rhythm articulate the universal. - Michael Seaver.  Until Nov 11

Paul Simon, Point Theatre, Dublin

His voice is the Dorian Gray of the music business: as crystalline clear now as it was when he recorded his first single with Art Garfunkel (when the duo were known as Tom and Jerry) back in 1957. Cutting a diminutive figure on the Point's stage, Simon reluctantly laid down his guitar after a solid two-hour performance that included three encores and a gargantuan set that in a lesser talent's hands would have seemed positively attention deficit disordered.

Simon is as much at home with pristine pop (50 Ways To Leave Your Lover and Mrs Robinson) as he is with bedsit balladry (Homeward Bound and The Boxer), jazz-inflected languor (Still Crazy After All These Years), anthemic hyperbole (Bridge Over Troubled Water) and gospel (Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes). In between, there are swathes of cajun, funk and blues, each one finding ample space to flourish in Simon's voluminous set list.

Simon's music reflects a refreshing respect for his listener: lyrically challenging and musically complex, he philosophises, muses, doubts, reflects and puzzles over life's big and not-so-big questions and invites his listener to join him en route.

Rarely does he stoop to declaring anything as crass as a bald opinion. And so with every exposure, there's something else to savour amid the sheer musical genius of the arrangements.

Backed by a seven-piece multi-instrumental battalion of musicians, he sauntered through the big ones and dallied among some pristine small ones, too. Wartime Prayers was better than any pious pulpiteering, Father And Daughter fingered the intricacies of familial ties and How Can You Live In The Northeast? cast a cold eye on religiosity of every hue with equal parts, grace and danger.

Simon is no slouch when it comes to the road. He re-fashions older material so that it's as fresh as a newly-incubated three-minute wonder, evidently relishing every last minute of the live performance. For a musician short on between-song banter, he created a remarkable bond with his audience: surely the sign of an artist born for the stage. - Siobhán Long

TV on the Radio, Temple Bar Music Centre

Somewhere deep within a sonic brawl, as sheets of white noise tussle with seasick drums, comes the fainter but no less chaotic jingle. It doesn't take long to spot the windchimes dangling from the head of David Sitek's guitar, as though the instruments had become entangled in a musical accident. This, though, is typical of the heedlessly experimental Brooklyn art-rockers TV on the Radio, who fill every available space with another idea.

The phrase "acquired taste" might have been invented for the band, something that even the initiated may have recognised during the jagged edges of their Irish live debut for Bud Rising. There is a visceral difference in admiring the fissures of I Was A Lover on record, and then feeling your internal organs pummelled and pulped in concert by its unnaturally staggered beat.

All of which may make TV on the Radio sound like hell to listen to, but, for palates jaded by the accessibility of pop and its just-as-accessible "alternatives", there is immense pleasure in difficult listening; like discovering a raw feast after an unending diet of processed food.

Live, the band encourages our involvement without making concessions to digestibility. Frontman Tunde Adebimpe urges handclaps through a propulsive The Wrong Way, then dances through the slow menace of Dreams, his arm slicing the air as though it might dispel the enveloping frenzy.

It is not unguided chaos, however. Province, from recent release Return to Cookie Mountain, is dense with wayward melodies, but exudes enough warm force to take you by the elbow and hurry you along with it. Young Liars and Wolf Like Me are as close at the band will get to conventional rock - the latter even coming with an invitation to bounce.

But if the set is mainly unsettling and turbulent, it is just the friction of an anxious age trying to find music in dissonance. When Bomb Yourself, a piece of corroded funk stewing in political anxiety, threatens to swamp Adebimpe with noise, he stands fast and whistles along sweetly. - Peter Crawley