Bold Moves review: Ballet Ireland search for an insurrection with the off-the-wall Gaga movement

This absorbing production is a triple-bill of dances about flights of departure. Photo: Declan English

O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin

Mar 22-30

★ ★ ★

If there’s a “school” in contemporary dance capturing the world’s imagination it’s probably Gaga, the playful movement developed by Ohad Naharin in the 1990s. Removing mirrors from rehearsal rooms and instructing dancers to improvise to cues, it’s intent on bringing new gestures into the vocabulary.

That is quite a step for Ballet Ireland, a resourceful company looking to expand its horizons. This triple-bill may have Minus 16, Naharin’s explosive dance from 1998, as its main event but the absorbing production has several flights of departure.

In Zoë Ashe-Browne’s taut new dance Us, for instance, a story of emigration is given fresh shape. On a stage occupied by only a bench, two dancers (Nathan Cornwell and Seu Kim) tumble and spin as if looking for a destination. That place, in Kevin Witzenberger’s cold arm movements, is impersonal and vain. Yet against Ólafur Arnauld’s aching piano music, a sweeping duet between man (Amand Pulaj) and woman (alternately played by Céline Le Grelle and Yuliya Prokharava) shows the miracle of connection in a distant place. 

Similarly, the returning staging of Ludovic Ondiviela’s Lost - premiered in 2015 - is another journey through the atmosphere. Set in a gloomy limbo, it finds fallen angels slumbering under the twinkling heavens of Paul Keogan’s stunning lighting.   

In Ondiviela’s choreography this becomes an intoxicating awakening. Rodolfo Saraiva, upright and fluid, catches the excellent Kesi Olley-Dorey by the chin, prompting her to rise en pointe and exchange gestures that rediscover who they are. To the quickening tempo of Ezio Bossi’s troubled music, the ensemble reaches a touching uniformity, their wing-like arm movements suggesting a proud return to grace. 

Ondiviela puts a lot of torment into these mysterious creatures, pitting Olley-Dorey against possessive moves given by Andrea Battaggia. Much of the choreography starts to repeat itself, however, and there is a sense that the concept is too thin to sustain. 

The production’s final take-off is Naharin’s Gaga-inspired Minus 16. Seated in a semi-circle, dancers cut lightning-fast shapes, stripping their traditional Jewish suits against a heavy-drumming Passover song. Shouting the lyrics to Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), the prayer to God begins to sound more like a personal manifesto. 

That desire for human connection becomes clearer as the long game of the production’s design is revealed, ceding a sepia stage to colourful tints supplied by the audience, some of who get involved. The transition from those opening slicing movements to this gentle circling of the stage is off-the-wall. 

Towards its end the dance really gives the company something to work with, as an unsettling duet between Nathan Cornwell and Sayako Tomiyoshi provide some of the darker moments in ballet you're going to see. 

Though the production is delivered with the tenacity of an experiment rather than the persuasiveness of a complete work, there is an undeniable sense that Ballet Ireland are searching for its Rite of Spring moment. Naharin’s dance isn’t as ground-breaking as it once was but it's still a leap.