Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review Does She Take Sugar?at the Project and Declan O'Rourkeand the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at the Helix.

Does She Take Sugar? Project, Dublin

The answer is: yes, Jean Butler takes sugar in her tea. The audience learns this and more in a recorded spoken sequence while Butler sits, as erect as when she dances, with a blindfold over her eyes. As with the rest of the show, Butler poignantly bares her soul while simultaneously masking it from view.

Apart from giving the public an opportunity to witness an extraordinary dancer at work, Does She Take Sugar? also presents an uncomfortably intimate glance into the isolation and melancholy of a star performer. Amid humorous statements such as "My mother says eating an egg without salt is like kissing your sister," we hear more sobering admissions such as "I used to have panic attacks" and "I can count my friends on the fingers of one hand".

This solo piece, Butler's first, speaks volumes about the aloneness of the gifted artist - an alternate title could have been It's Lonely at the Top. Butler's footwork defies description, particularly during the sequences in which she clatters her dancing shoes against the floor in a hailstorm of complex steps. The rigidity of the upper body is well matched by the strength and grace of her legs as she flutters them in and out in every direction, flitting nimbly across the stage like a speeding sprite.

In between sequences she writes notes on a large blackboard, which she at times turns around to serve as screen to video presentations - giving her a chance to catch her breath. A handheld film of the streets of Brooklyn expresses nostalgia or homesickness, a black and white video shows her close to tears, tensing her face and throat in suppressed anguish. At one point she dances, facing away from the audience toward the shadow of herself cast on the screen - but, as she is to her audience, her dancing-partner shadow has its back to her as well. The audience receives her emotion through a smokescreen of articulate muteness.

Although the production held the audience's attention easily until the end, the choreography felt repetitive and not terribly original - Butler's superb ability saved it, as did the complex undercurrents of ambiguous emotional craving. But as a first attempt at an eloquent solo, it is an admirable beginning.  - Christine Madden

Declan O'Rourke and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Helix, Dublin

There's little new or original in pop, rock and/or folk songs being dressed up in nice clothes, sprayed with perfume and taken out to a posh restaurant, but the general rule of thumb in these matters is that it's probably best to leave well-enough alone.

This experiment between Irish singer-songwriter O'Rourke - dressed in a sober suit, as befitting the occasion, and heard to say that it was a dream come true - and one of the most established and acclaimed classical music orchestras in the country, added little to the debate; O'Rourke sang quite a few songs from his excellent 2004 debut, Since Kyabram, in the way we would expect - his sonorous voice, quite a gorgeous instrument in itself, very much a heterosexual ying to, say, Rufus Wainwright's camp yang, swooped and swayed in displays of intimate passion plays.

The arrangements by LA-based Navan-man Brian Byrne, meanwhile, varied from the elusive and subtle to the over-dramatic and grandiose. It wasn't all O'Rourke, either, as Byrne previewed his own soundtrack work (one of which was for a movie in pre-production), something that clearly perplexed more than several members of an audience expecting an evening of Declan O'Rourke songs set to strings.

After the intermission, O'Rourke and orchestra continued their mutual grand affair with unusual decorum, yet the exercise seemed as much a classy night out as a reasonably successful, if equal parts self-serving, highly effective and immensely boring project.

Best wait for either Declan O'Rourke's new album (from which he delivered a couple of taster tracks, both of which sounded just fine) or Julie Feeney's self-orchestrated live treatment of her 13 Songs album at Belfast's Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. - Tony Clayton-Lea