Embodying Glass review: Philip Glass’s music fuels a poignant dance about surviving lockdown
A man shut in from the outside world yearns for something more in ConTempo Quartet and Jérémie Cyr-Cooke's dance-play
Galway Theatre Festival
★ ★ ★ ★
For their dance-play about surviving lockdown, ConTempo Quartet and choreographer-performer Jérémie Cyr-Cooke choose Philip Glass as their composer. There is a fitting inheritance here. Following the jittery structures of minimalist music and richly woven from doomy arpeggios, Glass’s music couldn’t be more ominous if it was intended for a Samuel Beckett play which, in the case of String Quartet No. 2, it was.
That may be why the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance resembles an abstract vacuum, its darkness relieved only by a white couch and door, like an apartment dropped into the middle of a void. In runs a man (Cyr-Cooke), shutting himself from the outside world, zipping athletically into a dive roll before extending outwards into a clean-cut gesture of elegance. The arch performer of physical theatre plays Blood On the Moon and Arbitration (Or a Life Worth Living) is drifting towards the precision and fluidity of classical dance.
Such is the achievement here that contemporary music and high-energy choreography combine to give the concerns of our crisis poignant shapes. In one haunting moment, writhing through panicked contortions, Cyr-Cooke gasps for air and desperately finds it by covering his mouth with a face mask. The anxieties of lockdown have become as natural as breathing.
A world of weary repetition is created through stylish movement, the neat image of a man sunk into a couch, obsessively covering his face to block out the world. Yet even the softened spirals of Glass’s music - given nice propulsion by the excellent players of the ConTempo Quartet – threaten to spill over into something more explosive. It drives Cyr-Cooke to extend upwards, in high kicks and outstretched arms.
The uncovered gem here is the choice of String Quartet No. 2. Written seven years after the austerely minimalist opera Einstein on the Beach, Glass’s compositions this time around are far more dynamic, with dramatic metric shifts and colourful harmonic schemes.
As a result, the draining tedium of quarantine may find an appropriate metaphor in Glass’s repetitive music but so does the struggle to survive. Like those musical shifts, Cyr-Cooke’s man is jolted from monotony, yearning for something more.
The brave step for him, no less than a world hopeful to re-emerge out of lockdown, is to motion towards the door leading outside.
Run ended.
Friends, in other news.
Since last we spoke I reviewed Boland: Journey of Poet for the Irish Times. This week, a feature I wrote about what kind of year theatre actors had during the pandemic ran in the Irish Times.
- Chris