Reviews

Irish Times critics review the latest shows

Bird Song

Earthquake dance festival,

Island Arts Centre, Lisburn

The most thrilling aspect of the SiobháDavies Dance Company's new work - receiving its world première at the Earthquake Festival of International Dance - is its structure, which is beautifully simple and simply beautiful.

It takes its trajectory from its centrepiece, encapsulated in an extraordinary moment of natural magic - the song of the Australian pied butcher, the bird which heralds in the dawn across the vast expanse of the Outback. At that still point, Davies's art of using unadorned dance to provoke vivid mind pictures is manifested in its purest and most evocative form. We have been brought there from what she calls "the leading edge" - along a route composed of

fragmented sounds, light and movements, by which we ultimately return to "the far edge".

Concentration is intense, never distracted by eye-catching costumes or sets.

Eight dancers, wearing a variety of simple sweat-pants and vests, perform in the round and in close proximity to the audience. Their perfectly-controlled individual, idiosyncratic movements are attuned to a soundtrack, which begins with an unsettling series of random synthesised and techno sounds and gradually evolves into recognisable melodies and musical sequences.

Likewise the lighting - at first it gives the dancers only a thinly lined grid to work in, but it builds to the wonderful glow of daybreak, which accompanies the glorious bird song of the title. It is but a brief respite before the performance spins back into freefall, like a stellar

explosion in the night sky. This piece bears all the hallmarks of Davies's cool power of suggestion, designed not to inspire burning passions, but to appeal to the empirical roots of sight, sound, movement and imagination.

Bird Song is at the Millennium Forum, Derry tomorrow. The company is holding a week of workshops and masterclasses at the Island Arts Centre - details from Dance Northern Ireland on Belfast 9024 9930.

Jane Coyle

Catherine Leonard (Violin)

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Bach - Partita No 3. Ian Wilson - Eigenschatten

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Catherine Leonard is Ireland's leading violinist. This free concert presented her in the intimate environment of the Hugh Lane Gallery and in a programme which would test the plaudits her playing receives.

Among the stiffest of tests is Bach's music for unaccompanied violin.

Leonard's opening Prelude in the Partita in E had a jubilant, extrovert freshness which made a joyful return in the concluding Gigue. In her hands the second movement Loure - a gentle, pastoral dance from Normandy - was a soulful private meditation upon which we listeners were eavesdropping. Here there was more individualism than the parameters of period style might allow, and indeed she played the other inner movements with generous breathing room.

But it was hard to imagine Bach objecting, so nicely judged and faithfully musical was the shaping of her phrases.

The magic of this piece, of course, comes from an instrument intended mostly for melody having to provide also its own bass and harmony. Leonard released this magic with flawlessly balanced double-stopping and a sure-footed placing of accents.

The performance of Belfast-born Ian Wilson's Eigenschatten, jointly commissioned by Leonard and the Sunday at Noon series with funding from the Arts Council, was a world première.

The German title means "self-shadow", and the piece's second half is accompanied by a live recording made of the first. Wilson re-tunes two of the strings to create harmonic instability in music which he describes as spacious and exploratory.

It is also lonely and remote, with shimmering harmonics like troubled sighs, interrupted here and there by lively outbursts. In the second half the player sometimes echoed the tape, sometimes contrasted with it in harmony or register, sometimes simply blended with it. The overall effect was both mesmeric and haunting in Leonard's intensely thoughtful performance.

Michael Dungan

Composers' Choice, Eric Sweeney

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Eric Sweeney is a composer whose music has changed radically over the years, the major shift being from a polyglot avant-gardism into a carefully circumscribed minimalism.

The pieces of his own that he selected for his Composers' Choice programme at the National Concert Hall were all from the last 15 years. There was a small touch of aleatory technique in the Processional for brass ensemble, written in 1989 when the composer was 41, the work which offered the strongest flavour of his old way of doing things.

The new style includes what, by his own admission, has been an obsessive concern with the bright key of D major. His pre-concert talk amusingly included an account of how a compositional decision to steer clear of it somehow led back to writing within its comforting confines.

When Sweeney talks about writing in the key of D he means that in a narrow-focused way. There's no suggestion in his music of the tonal variety or tension you might expect of composers from Bach and Handel to Mahler and Shostakovich. He's rather like a conversationalist with a favourite topic - any changes are just a temporary distraction before he shifts right back to where he wants to be.

The problem in the finished compositions is one of balance. From the composer's description, the harmonic and melodic simplicity seem to be conceived as a background for a more involved and intricate style of rhythmic writing. And that intricacy is real enough to have given problems to the singers of the Lassus Scholars under Ite O'Donovan in Be joyful in the Lord (1994).

Yet, as Sweeney's choice of music by other men (Tavener, Messiaen and Britten) made plain, composers who demand thattheir listeners' attention be spread across a number of musical parameters, can provide an altogether richer experience.

There are, of course, composers who successfully make a virtue out of pared-back writing. But doing so successfully requires a distinctiveness of character or an arresting strength of compositional

strategy that Sweeney seems not to want to truck with. The risk he runs is that of seeming anodyne. The patterns flow, but the effects do not gel.

In this programme he came closest to escaping the routine of his own procedures in The Widening Gyre (2003) for organ, which sifted from Philip Glass-like rocking figures behind a decidedly un-Philip Glass-like melody into a kitsch-gothic toccata that Andrew Lloyd-Webber would surely not be ashamed of. And in the closing Te Deum (2000) for soloist (the under-exploited mezzo soprano Imelda Drumm), choir, organ and brass ensemble, there were some angular intrusions to suggest that Sweeney is not totally averse to merging elements of the different styles he has used.

Michael Dervan

Irish National Youth Ballet Theatre

The Helix, Dublin

It wasn't until the final coda of Les Sylphides that you felt the young dancers of the Irish National Youth Ballet Company began to reach their full potential as they ate up the space and filled the stage at the climax of the ballet before returning to the opening tableaux. In adapting the Petipa original, Fiona Chadwick kept the choreography simple yet full and threw down a challenge to the performers that they happily met. The opportunity to perform the ballet blanc classic and perform with guest artists Chika Temma and Zhannat Atymtayev will no doubt be cherished.

Unfortunately, the wafer-thin choreography elsewhere in the programme went nowhere near fore-fronting the performers. Les Petites Danseuses de Degas by Fin Browne used paintings by Degas projected on the back of the stage that were then brought to life by the dancers who started by mirroring the image.

The junior members of the company tackled the dramatic and spatial demands and reacted to the changing music by Bizet.

There was not as much variety in À La Mode by Anne-Campbell Crawford, which seemed coy and restrained. A self-proclaimed "surrealist look at fashion", its static structure offered little to the performers.

Chika Temma and Zhanat Atymtayev,who were the guest artists with Cork City Ballet's Ballet Spectacular, presented Diana and Actaeon's pas de deux from Vaganova's version of Esmerelda. It is a popular recital piece, particularly in Russia, and both dancers met the virtuoso tour de force head on. As in their performances with Cork City Ballet they are a comfortable and confident partnership who can be bravura without imposing their own personality on the choreography.

They were equally impressive in the mazurkas in Les Sylpides (in spite of the restrictions of the stage) and Temma captured the feeling of pure abandonment in the pas de deux.

But the night belonged to the young performers and responding to their needs is a challenge for the company. Although production values are high, as

members of a national company their talent deserves the finest Irish and international choreography.

Michael Seaver