L’Oublié(e) is a stunningly beautiful piece – a mostly monochrome series of moving pictures that blends contemporary circus, dance and word-free visual theatre, all accompanied by a highly inventive lighting design, and an eclectic soundspace that merges ambient electronica with echoing snatches of old-world waltzes, tangos and torch-songs. The 1930s classic Dream a Little Dream […]

Mid-way through Fragments – Volume 1, I began to worry about choreographer Sylvain Émard’s state of mind. The work seemed so gloomy and bleak. A post-show talk revealed that his starting point for each of this series of short pieces was to ask the dancer what was most urgent in their lives right now. He […]

For those who grow up by the coast, the sea has a mighty pull. Swimming off the jetty, watching the tide roll back across the vast, winkle studded mud flats of the Estuary. I can smell it now. If, like Lorraine, you are a Celtic mythical seal-woman, the ocean is eventually going to draw you […]

Homer portrayed Odysseus as a man of outstanding wisdom and shrewdness, eloquence, courage and endurance. His wanderings and the recovery of his house and kingdom are the central themes of the Odyssey. James Joyce, in Ulysses – the novel that shifts Homer to one June day in Dublin 1904 – makes his hero Leopold Bloom a […]

A dancer on stage expects to be looked at; looked at with a critical, perhaps judgmental eye. Claire Cunningham, in this extraordinary short piece, directs our gaze and holds it. Inspired by the work of medieval Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, it conjures visions of an escape from hell, with Cunningham cowering in a corner, a […]