REVIEWS

Events from the Dublin Dance Festival and Dublin Gay Theatre Festival reviewed.

Dublin Dance Festival: One ShotAbbey Theatre

MICHAEL SEAVER

“One Shot” might obviously refer to the photography technique of Charles “Teenie” Harris, who believed that was all you needed to capture an image. But in Ronald K Brown’s tribute to the photographer, it also refers to the one shot we get in life, the one opportunity to create change. This ideal might sound a bit yes-we-can, but it has always been the crux of Brown’s artistic vision and is not a recent sop to the zeitgeist.

He achieves his aim in the quietest way possible. He never presents a screaming political manifesto in his choreography, but maintains a quiet spirituality, which gently simmers under his agile and grounded vocabulary. Movement is soft yet precise, peppered with ever-changing shifts in direction, arms thrown skywards, off-centre spinning and hunched-over lurches. When performed in long passages of unison, this neutral palette of movement murmurs concurrence, aligning performers to each other. When seen in one of Brown’s two solos, that same movement takes on a more prayerful quality.

Teenie Harris’s photographs fit perfectly with this. His monochrome images of 20th-century African-American communities in Pittsburgh were projected behind the eight dancers throughout the performance. They too shun rhetoric, rather letting the everyday snapshots of men, women and children tell the story of discrimination and segregation. Each photograph might reflect a larger narrative of political and social struggle, but the individual faces are always the primary subjects.

This performance felt underpowered, not helped by a quiet, less-than-capacity house. In particular, the recording of Mamadouba “Mohamed” Camara’s percussion didn’t energise the dancing in the same way as his live presence. Elsewhere, the music is a well-chosen mixture of sentimental songs for cutesy boy-meets-girls duets and more robust jazz standards that drive the rhythm along.

One Shot quietly ends with the final words of Phyllis Hyman’s Remember Who You Are – “remember me . . .” – as all eight dancers face the photographs on the cyclorama. It is a final statement that puts a full-stop to Brown’s life-affirming choreography. More than any quick-hit rhetoric, these movements and Harris’s images continue to reverberate and softly subvert long after the curtain has come down. Dublin Dance Festival continues until May 23; www.dublindancefestival.ie

Dublin Gay Theatre Festival: Walnuts Remind Me of My Mother/The Picture (of Dorian Gray)

Cobalt Cafe/New Theatre

PETER CRAWLEY

“You’re such a cliche!” yells Rua, a young lesbian adolescent, at her haranguing mother, Blaise (Bairbre Ni Chaoimh), who is acting according to type. It’s a reassuring and sharpening note, sounded early in Elizabeth Moynihan’s new play for Focus Theatre, which recognises that any coming-of-age tale about sexual identity, an escape from small-town parochialism and the liberation of a hedonistic subculture is potentially riddled with the things.

Performed in the first week of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, the play belongs to two minority groups under-represented by the festival: shows with identifiably lesbian content and new Irish productions. The Cobalt Cafe precludes all but the most rudimentary stagecraft and Noelle Brown’s production shares a no-frills festival aesthetic: bare staging, basic lights, no set. All attention, then, rests on performance and play. On the show’s final night, the principal performer had departed the production to contend in the heats of The Rose of Tralee, an interesting trajectory to compare with that of her character, and the uncommonly assured Fiona Conlon substituted.

This was excellent, albeit accidental, casting. Unlike the typical ingenue protagonist of the gay Bildungsroman, Rua is uncommonly assured. Moynihan may present her as a tormented self-harmer, but anyone who can hit on an on-duty nurse (Maria Tecce) hardly wants for confidence, and the play is all the better for it.

But three things immediately defeat the play’s bravery: firstly, Tecce delivers the line, “Rua, I’ve got a ward full of patients outside”; then they kiss; and then Rua’s mother walks in on the scene. These are perfectly appropriate elements within a sex fantasy or a soap opera, but there are too many clever ideas and good lines in Moynihan’s story to suggest that these are forms that suit her play.

The remainder of the tale balances precariously between cutting new paths and resorting to the worn trails of cliche. We get familial intolerance, a fascinating portrait of a woman with gender identity disorder, a ridiculously pat plot contrivance that reunites three central characters, and yet another in flagrante discovery ( "Hey babe, I forgot my wallet!"). There is little wrong with Moynihan's play which couldn't still be solved by what's right with it – it is due to tour – but at the moment the clash between complicated ideas and the succour of easy formula seems like a tough nut to crack.

The Picture (of Dorian Gray), from Indiana-based student company Independent Theatre Ensemble, is essentially a grad-school deconstruction of Oscar Wilde's seminal novel. We get a brisk, truncated, multiple-role-play version of the story seeped in metatheatricality, metaphysics and metanarratives, and played out by three performers who inscribe their own pop-cultural/confessional marginalia in the borders between each scene.

More cerebral than physical, the production certainly has the necessary smarts, but not yet a performative discipline to serve them. Depicted with a complicated mangle of sunglasses, each character becomes an impenetrable pose – an intellectual idea that alienates our empathy – while the internal processes of adapter, director and cast seem so convoluted and self-involved that the audience has little access.

The result is curious but frustrating. Its attractive qualities are hinted at but concealed, and the surface is off-putting: it is the inverse of Dorian Gray.

The Picture (of Dorian Gray)runs until tomorrow. The Absolut Dublin Gay Theatre Festival runs until Sun; www.gaytheatre.ie