Night Dances: A spectacle that’s part fairy tale, part urban drama
In the striking nightlife of Emma Martin’s dance, dancers pursue new transformations. Photo: Ste Murray
The National Stadium, Dublin Theatre Festival
★ ★ ★
In an alley outside a boxing stadium, long after dusk, a rare sight appears before those arrived at United Fall and Dublin Theatre Festival’s new dance Night Dances. A mysterious woman cloaked in a thin cloth resembling a wedding veil sits atop a horse, a city-block away from Dublin’s Liberties. Choreographer Emma Martin’s new dance seems as much fairy tale as it is urban.
Throughout this production, night has intriguing effects on those wakeful to it. Against the silence of a quiet stadium, a man moves in side-steps and upward-reaches, as if on a dance floor. Before long, in Javier Ferrer Machin’s impressive performance, his body expands, revealing new possibilities, as it extends into more rigorously controlled gestures. This appears to be the transformation of a raver into a contemporary dancer.
Nightlife, of course, is full of dance. Martin’s choreography identifies in such movement pursuits of self-transformation though, admirably, this isn’t always seen to be achieved. When Ferrer Machin beckons for some recognition from the audience, only to unravel to a sad standstill before a watchful young girl, it feels like a hoped-for transcension has been dashed.
There is triumph elsewhere, when electrifying movement by the young performers of Dance Republic Carlow evokes the thrill of a freestyle competition. The uniformity of line and rhythm, propelled by Daniel Fox’s noise-rock music, also resembles something conventional – a spectacle more dazzling to the senses than packed with meaning.
Martin’s dances have occasionally sat uncomfortably between those two impulses, as they seemed to navigate diverse inheritances from Miet Warlop to Enda Walsh, flirting unabashedly with abstraction while courting interpretation. Night Dances most resembles a dance from an earlier, less aesthetically-cluttered era in Martin’s work: 2014’s Tundra, where a sparse vision was similarly washed out by a desolate, David Lynch-style atmosphere. (Those who prefer the robust, physicalised conceits of Listowel Syndrome, Dogs and Girl Song might get lost in the woods here).
That’s not to say that Night Dances doesn’t go places unexpected. Fox’s music makes a mixset of tempos from electronic dance music while nudging the choreography. The mesmerising fluidity of one clubber’s solo (Ryan O’Neill) gets interrupted by squiggly guitars that send him careening, as if dancing were a medium for working off certain antagonisms.
It’s a delicate balancing act to make the syllabus-free movement of rave not feel pre-calculated. The arrival of more women covered head-to-toe in veils heralds an exhilarating trio that sheds their couth materials, transforming them into ferocious pleasure-seekers (Jessie Thompson, Aoife McAtamney and Robyn Byrne). The choreography throws their veils off and on, each time showing them enervated by the cloth, but not really revealing any new meanings with each manipulation of fabric.
The overall effect is that of a vision revealed in striking yet wispy images, faint streaks of a tantalising, fuller dance. Martin is unafraid of abstraction but there’s also a danger of presenting the mysteriousness of art as cryptic, rather than as something to be marvelled at, like a wonder-filled nightfall.
Runs until 16th October.
Friends,
In case you missed it, I reviewed other productions from Dublin Theatre Festival for the Irish Times.
You can check out my review of The Book of Names (“The Book of Names: Louise Lowe sharpens Anu’s enthralling approach to theatre”) and my review of Conversations After Sex (“Conversations After Sex: ★★★★★ for Mark O’Halloran’s extraordinary new play”).
- Chris