Reviews

Irish Times critics review three Dublin events: Distanzlos at the Project; The Orb at the Ambassador and Islands In The Stream at the Helix

Distanzlos at the Project, Dublin

The title of this work by the German choreographer Thomas Lehmen means not just "without distance" but "in the absence of distance". The subtle difference holds importance for his piece, which works at eliminating separations between artist and art, artist and public, even artist and self, which emerge through the creative, artistic and performance process.

A former student of the School for New Dance Development, in Amsterdam, Lehmen creates work that defies any expectation or attempt to make sense of his performance.

While the audience collected in the theatre he wandered about the stage, warming up. The no-smoking and emergency-exit announcements seemed to invade this at random; then he sat in silence in his set - a long table with sound equipment and a multitude of microphones, flanked by two uncomfortable chairs - jiggling his legs and contemplating the audience. It was like watching the Hyde personality of a computer geek. Only an occasional cough or nervous shifting of members of the audience broke the lengthy silence.

His eventual launch in to more active performance involved a performance of the performance: Lehmen read from the notes he took while creating the production, then acted out the ideas he said he had had. This involved miming and dancing the frequently Sisyphean tasks he had conjured up. We saw him fill a room with bricks, shovel sand from one pile to another, writhe across the floor with a microphone in his mouth. He told stories about disturbing dreams, opened himself for exactly two minutes to audience requests and recounted a moving story about the rescue of five men trapped in a coal-mining shaft. He announced what he was going to do at the end - walk off while the lights stayed on - then did it. It was a long time before anyone had the courage to applaud.

This complicated and involved extrapolation of the process from intent to performance had, contrary to expectation, the effect of immediacy and intimacy. Totally flummoxed, the audience has no choice but to jettison prejudgment and open itself as a tabula rasa to Lehmen's performance. And in the ambiguity of what that performance really is, Lehmen creates a situation in which, just like it says on the tin, there is no creative, mental or participatory distance between artist and audience, process and presentation. To top it all, Distanzlos was also very funny in an absurd, cheeky, silly way.

Christine Madden

The Orb at the Ambassador, Dublin

If Kraftwerk were the forefathers of electronic music, then The Orb are the drop-out uncle the rest of the family never talks about. Fetching up just as rave culture had splintered into a million offshoots, they proffered a bleary hotchpotch of dub, ambient and new-age proselytising. Their records were trippy and epic but shot through with bursts of nuttiness and anti-establishment polemic. With fellow techno-loons The KLF also in the ascendency, it briefly seemed that the future would not be shiny and sleek but dreadlocked, tie-dyed, parent-hating and kaftan-wearing.

It didn't turn out that way, of course. Few Orb fans were minded to become techno pagans; most never even got around to growing scraggy beards or baking lentil tart.

A decade on their Bob Marley posters and bongs are long consigned to the junk heap while The Orb themselves feel fiercely quaint: their electro-hippy shtick could date from the late 1960s as easily as the early 1990s for all its current relevance.

Nostalgia, then, was the prevailing mood at the three-piece's Dublin concert. Ostensibly, they were promoting their new album, Bicycles & Tricycles, a drowsy revisiting of their dubby roots.

But with many in the crowd brushing middle age - the band's members are well north of 40 - it was obvious the majority had come to luxuriate in The Orb's past rather than investigate their present.

They can't have been disappointed. Chastened perhaps by years of relative obscurity, The Orb appeared sufficiently appreciative of what remains of their following to dust down a smattering of "hits".

Towers Of Dub emerged as a groggy meander, throbbing and defiantly incoherent; Blue Room was more or less unrecognisable, only its haunting Eastern chant intact. Little Fluffy Clouds was the highlight, with crushing beats and a burbling background melody. Unforgivably, though, the number was divested of its eerie "What were the skies like?" sample, which is a bit like an a cappella rendition of Stairway To Heaven: interesting yet pointless.

The show culminated in the surreal sight of Alex Paterson leading the audience through a bombastic DJ set. Watching the bear-like frontman sway and jive to Eminem's Without Me evoked the sort of reaction you might experience on bumping into Elton John at a open-air rave. Frankly, you were disinclined to believe your eyes.

As you shuffled into the night it occurred that, although The Orb's powers may be in decline, they remain as endearingly daft as ever. What an oddly reassuring thought.

Ed Power

Islands In The Stream at the Helix, Dublin

The Russian physical theatre group Derevo have carved out a reputation in the past few years, particularly as darlings of Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The mix of movement and image has been potent in works such as Red Zone and La Divina Commedia, but Islands In The Stream has a softer centre, as it presents innocent depictions of seaside bliss alongside po-faced positions on the environment and mankind's recklessness at sea.

Jettisoning narrative is all very well, but the sequences of physical set pieces were too varied in originality and impact to sustain momentum. Separated by blackouts, they depicted happy-go-lucky sailors, stern sea captains and all manner of beast below water.

With shaved heads and white make-up the performers embodied the characters with constantly changing physical states and energies. The simpler images lingered more persuasively: towards the end a man jumped in to the waves, and you could feel the exhilaration of the cold water on his body as he played, washed and began to fight against the powerful forces that relentlessly pounded him.

Earlier, two performers slowly lifted two semi-spherical "islands" and carried them towards a single small suspended silver globe that looked like a Christmas decoration. Eventually, they came together to form a bigger sphere, engulfing the smaller one. It was limpid, yet the metaphor was powerful, as was a much bigger inflatable ball that simultaneously suggested Earth, womb and creature as it softly bounced across the stage. The loud and austere soundscape of Roman Dubinnikov had no such subtlety, but Falk Dittrich's stunning lighting lent mood and magic, creating wondrous worlds above and below the waterline.

But in spite of misgivings about the shape of the overall work the physical depiction of the fragility of man in the face of the untameable sea was elating and enduring. This made it all the more frustrating when a voice-over was felt necessary to explain away the sensual and wind things up at the end.

Michael Seaver