Dēmos – Films of Separation and Togetherness review: Covid presented as contemporary dance’s nightmare

Masked dancers stand apart, trapped in a gloomy derelict building, in Liz Roche and David Coonan's dance. Photo: Steve O'Connor

Dublin Dance Festival

★ ★ ★

For the title of their new dance, choreographer Liz Roche and composer David Coonan have gone with “Dēmos.” Underneath the endlessly philosophical guesswork of a word meaning “land” and “the place where the people live” as well as its political inference as the root of “democracy,” takes place a dance that has been vaguely described as an exploration of what happens when people gather together in a space. Maybe it’s all Greek to me but I thought that was already the baseline of contemporary dance.

If Démos sounded a little fuzzy in the early years of its development, somewhere along the way it found something specific to say. Interrupted by the pandemic and now transmitting to audiences through streaming, it has adapted to a changed world where togetherness is an impossible dream. A better, more resonant idea seemed to be to create an elegiac dance where people cannot gather.

Roche is alive to the consequences that the current moment poses for an art form often reliant on touch and intimacy. From our first sight of masked dancers standing apart, trapped in a gloomy derelict building in Katie Davenport’s excellent design, it seems we have landed in contemporary dance’s nightmare. Visceral choreography carves out evocative imagery, as dancers extend towards classically familiar gestures but get stuck down by violent convulsions.

Similarly unsettling, Coonan’s music - rivetingly played by the Crash Ensemble players - follows a mostly dissonant structure that sometimes tips over into wild improvisation. It’s like a composition for a dance on the verge of collapse.

The production, directed for stream by Roche and José Miguel Jiménez, occasionally moves into the backstage and auditorium of the Abbey Theatre, filling interiors with chilling projections of absent musicians and dancers, as if the theatre were tormented by its own suspended programming. In its invention, Jiménez’s film work contains parallels to that of Jack Phelan’s on To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), another reminder that video designers are best placed to transfer the smoke and mirrors of a stage into streamed productions.

Dēmos is striking in design and mood but its choreography tends to oscillate between vivid conclusions and muddled imagery. There is no denying the affecting oblivion of Kévin Coquelard stirring alone against a projection of dancers free to embrace, or a sad duet between Luke Murphy and Emily Terndrup shivering into despair when they fall away from each other’s grasp. For every crystal-cut meaning, there are cryptic movements such as those between Yumi Lee and Lucia Kickham in a duet that seems to belong to a different dance. A crucial finale solo is also unknowable enough to rob the production of its impact.

Equally mysterious is the fate of Justine Cooper, one of our finest dancers and who the production seems to lose halfway through.

Running until 29th May.