My Fierce Ignorant Step
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Ten dancers, five from each wing, file on to a stripped-back stage as if walking into an exercise yard. Initially imprisoned in their bodies, they move simultaneously to an insistent beat, in seamlessly altering lines.
For 60 exhilarating minutes we travel with them backwards and forwards in time and space, hypnotised by the subtle precision of their movements and their complete inhabitation of Kornilios Salamis’s score.
Although at first the four men and six women respond to the dull thud of that continuous beat as though on autopilot, there is a strong sense of an invisible connection between them. They have a mesmerising ability to swap places in the changing diagonal lines and patterns, adroitly slipping sideways or passing in front of or behind one another, unseeing but innately alert to one another.
That sense of a collective, together with music and memory, is key to the intentions of this new work from the Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos, which is at the Abbey Theatre as part of Dublin Dance Festival.
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He has said that a key part of the soundtrack of his youth was the work of the renowned composer and once-exiled political activist Mikis Theodorakis, particularly his setting to music of the poem Axion Esti, in which the Greek Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis explores “the essence of his being and the identity of his country and people”.
It was a period of exuberance and youthful energy for his generation, and Papadopoulos stunningly reclaims it here for the future, as the music and dance build to a brilliantly paced, euphoric crescendo.
An identity once lost is newly reworked as motifs of an older folk dance are subtly evoked through knees poised for a traditional jump, toes pointed toes and heels crossed, and through circling arms. The joy of being alive. Together.
My Fierce Ignorant Step is at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Dance Festival, until Saturday, May 9th
