Texture Like Sun
Samuel Beckett Theatre
★★★☆☆
It’s golden brown that has a texture like sun, according to The Stranglers’ 1982 hit. In their song, golden brown refers to heroin, and Diarmuid Armstrong Mayock’s choreographic debut, Texture Like Sun, is a limpid portrayal of the inescapable cycles of addiction and drug use. Inescapable at least on stage, where the choreographer eschews a road-to-recovery narrative and instead simply repeatedly shows the deadening pattern of hit, euphoria and comedown.
A couch is centre stage and a focal point for the low points. Here the three dancers – Armstrong Mayock, Ludmila Gilles and Nathalie Schmidt – slump, either conscious or unconscious, drawn away only to depict blissful highs, petty squabbles or violence. These danced episodes contain both identifiable gestures and more abstract movement and are always driven by the characters’ emotions. They never break into reflection or commentary but just single-mindedly pursue immediate needs to the constant drive of aptly chosen sounds and riffs from the musicians Dee Armstrong and Lughaidh Armstrong.
Matt Burke’s lighting design is also important, with sickly blues and greens in moments of despair and banks of bright straw-coloured lights for moments of euphoria, creating an almost literal texture like sun.
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Throughout the hour there is no moralising, simply a portrayal of addiction. Some light humour and unison movement humanise the characters and suggest something more universal. Texture like sun might refer to heroin, but there are many ways by which each of us chooses artificial dopamine hits over our body’s natural endorphins. The consequences might be different, but the dependence is the same.
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Continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Thursday, September 14th
