Hyperphysical: A Double Bill
Lir Academy, Dublin
★★★★★
Endurance-based dances can be one dimensional: dancers pushed to physical limits while audiences marvel at their stamina and applaud the sweat. Often the underlying aesthetics involve dehumanising the body and presenting dancers as abstract physical objects whirring around the stage.
The Future Is on the Way, by the New York choreographer Abby Zbikowski, is fascinatingly different. Punishingly relentless in its physicality, it spurns abstraction. Instead Zbikowski presents individuals seeking collectivism as their bodies strive to create a common physical language.
Five dancers embark on short full-throttle movement phrases like athletic drills, their breath and grunts creating an uneasy harmony with the sound of pounding feet and bodies smashing against the floor. Performed in silence, the movement is driven by a hidden common pulse often revealed in rhythms that emerge in tapped feet or body percussion. After about 30 seconds they briefly pause until someone shouts “Go!” and another sequence begins.
The athletic physical language isn’t rooted in any one dance style; traces of street, contemporary, even folk dance seem to emerge and become subsumed.
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Short solos offer brief respite from the relentless motion, highlighting each performer’s individuality. Shouts of encouragement from fellow dancers (and even from the choreographer sitting in the audience) show the shared mission to constantly feed off each other’s energy.
The excellent, mainly Ireland-based cast – Inez Berdychowska, Roberta Ceginskaite, Boris Charrion, Rosie Mullin and Adam O’Reilly – might not be well known to Dublin audiences, but they have coalesced into an impressively tight-knit ensemble.
Overall the work offers hope. There is a sense that, rather than being imposed from outside, the physicality is a task the dancers set themselves towards a greater good.
John Scott’s Actions, which has been around for 13 years, changes with different performers. A zany duet for two men, it reveals its own construction as the dancers voice the inspiration behind an image or movement as they perform, such as “My back is exploding” or a “Trisha Brown”.
In this version, called Actions (Now), Adam O’Reilly and Boris Charrion are deadpan in their delivery, which only heightens the humour. Simultaneously entertaining and meditative, its final image lingers most as the two men walk side by side in silence to closing darkness: a beautiful ending full of hope and solidarity.
Double bill continues at Lir Academy, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 14th
