The Veiled Ones review: Which way is witch?
Based on Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Junk Ensemble’s new dance is a jumble of counterstatements. Photo: Luca Truffarelli
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★
For an age, witches have been treated with a certain ambivalence: are they a damaging stereotype or a feminist symbol? Portrayals of women breaking rules and punishing men in charge can be thrilling. On the other hand, they are made monstrous enough to be deemed a liability.
The latter version fed into the dark fantasy universe of Roald Dahl. The Witches – a novel for young readers, published in 1983 – sends a young boy into the clutches of a secret organisation of witches hellbent on obliterating children, their stomach-churning appearances made iconic by the sight of a glamorous, straight-faced Anjelica Huston peeling off her face to reveal a grisly crone underneath in one unsettling film adaptation.
If these depictions of women as contemptibly dangerous - which attracted accusations of misogyny at the novel’s arrival - put Dahl’s feminism in doubt, he does go the distance to make the boy’s protective grandmother an ultimate guardian. Still, the story has always had its baggage.
Such are the inheritances of Junk Ensemble’s new dance. Loosely based on Dahl’s novel, The Veiled Ones is trying to lift a shroud. (Literally. An otherworldly beginning sees figures come to life under shiny black silks, creating impossibly tall silhouettes. Is this choreography or witchcraft)?
Inside the attractively vintage home of a sorceress (Finola Crowley), we are told the differing traits of witches – how they like to transform children into mice; how they aid the environment. “Most importantly, we are kind,” she says, contrary to what you’ve heard.
Rewriting childhood fiction seems to be the aim of choreographer-directors Jessica Kennedy and Megan Kennedy, who, after years casting child performers in their productions, present their first dance aimed at young audiences. That brings an embrace of broader, clownish flourishes but for the most part Junk Ensemble’s unsentimental movement and boldly surrealist displays are still uncompromisingly intact; a company closer to Dostoyevsky or David Lynch than Disney.
That’s not to say that the choreography – created in collaboration with the cast – is too cryptic to follow. Rather, what The Veiled Ones is trying to say about witch-folklore nearly immediately becomes confusing. Not long after Cronin’s enchantress reveals that witches are good-natured is she locked in a struggle with a youngster (an unflaggingly impressive Kévin Coquelard), eventually imprisoning him in the body of a chicken. How wicked.
The production, freighted by terrible secrets and dark obsessions, moves into a confectionary shop, where Coquerlard embodies a menagerie of different animals under the spooky incantations of two girls (Joya Hobson and Priya Hobson), and is unable to be hoisted from his preoccupations by the gentle lifts of a concerned adult (Miguel do Vale).
When the dance allows its abstracted movement to lift, allowing for the more instant recognition of slapstick, a group of children jeer the appearances of witches while listing the contradicting demands made on the supernatural figures. “Be funny but also sad. Be sad but also magical,” say the bossy youngsters. Kids can be so cruel.
By this point, it’s difficult to know what The Veiled Ones is attempting to say about witches, whether they’re a suspect or a victim. The final sequences of the dance take a left turn, as if trying to rise above its jumble of counterstatements.
Those gestures towards the end incorporate imagery of blossoming plants and regrowth – the perception of witches as healers of the planet. This too seems to be Junk Ensemble’s interpretation, yet the required levitation becomes subsumed by movement given to calculation and the sudden diminishment of set designer Valerie Reid’s terrific displays. It isn’t pure magic.
Runs until 13th September.