Queen of the Meadows
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Robyn Byrne is an award-winning dance artist based in the midlands. After graduating from Northern School of Contemporary Dance, in England, Byrne returned to Ireland in 2018, gaining recognition as a regular presence in productions by Junk Ensemble, Emma Martin and Philip Connaughton.
The artist began developing her own vision in 2020 with O Before I. An evocative piece of filmed dance featuring her mother, Olive, it delved into their personal relationship as a way to reflect on maternal bonds more broadly.
Two years later Byrne produced Glimmer, a dance installation that merged AI technology, music and movement. Performed by the propulsive Róisín Harten behind the glass of a commercial shopfront, the work indicated the shape of Byrne’s evolving choreographic sensibilities
The project also marked the beginning of her artistic partnership with the director Rachel Ní Bhraonáin, which continued with Mosh, from 2023, a heavy-metal-inspired performance involving five dancers and a drummer.
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Byrne conceived Queen of the Meadows after the death of her grandmother, who trusted in folkloric habits such as knocking on wood for luck and using cobwebs to cover cuts and grazes. Themes of memory, loss, renewal and the supernatural filter through this new performance, in which Byrne’s regular collaborators are joined by a new face, in the performer Susanne Engbo Andersen.
The Danish dance artist, whom Byrne met at Northern, helped her develop the show’s choreography, holding work-in-progress events at Dublin Dance Festival and Tanztendenz, in Munich, before this premiere at Project Arts Centre.
Queen of the Meadows, which is at Project as part of Live Collision International Festival, begins with a shrouded object slowly rotating in a pool of warm light. With each turn, sheets of diaphanous wrapping uncoil from it as hazy chords, strings and keys oscillate through the air, buoying the audience as they find their seats.
When the show begins in earnest the mysterious object has already divested itself of several layers. We realise that beneath the muslin webbing are two people, and so the shroud, which carries connotations of death and burial, takes on a new meaning.
Contrasting with its initial funereal impression, it is more like a chrysalis, or amniotic sac, from which the dancers emerge. Wriggling across the stage, these hatchlings perform a postpupation dance that slowly matures and gathers strength.
Byrne and Andersen are an excellent duo, highly attuned to one another. Each brings a distinct movement aesthetic to bear, the variation in their styles and capacities compellingly producing moments of disjunction and flow.
In one particularly notable episode the performers skilfully reference signature music-video dance movements, though these forms degrade almost as soon as they appear.
A brilliant final phase sees Byrne and Andersen engage heads, necks and spines in an intense rhythmic sequence, haloes of hair following the looping movements. Then a crack appears in the background, lightning-like across the stage, revealing a new world beyond. As the show closes, it raises the tantalising possibility of a second birth.
