One Penny Operas
6 dancers and a one man band – double bass, guitar, electronics, saws and bowls of various sizes – get together for this playful piece of dance improv. At first there’s a lot of walking about but when the performers find their feet, so to speak, what evolves is an engaging 30 minutes of individual and interactive dance coupled with some very interesting sounds. The location, on the top floor of DanceHouse with its big walls of glass high above the trees, gives it an exotic feel. What a great way to spend your lunch hour. The show alas is finished, but DanceHouse is worth a visit any time. www.danceireland.ie
Power Point (Camden Court Hotel)
Name-tagged and system dairy in hand, you find yourself in an anonymous boardroom, waiting for who knows what. Mary Point, overweight and sweaty in her ill-fitting suit, introduces her heroes; the evangelical Jack and Jill Power descend on you like locusts and WHAM - there you are, in corporate motivational hell. Cliches have never sounded so scary nor exhortations so empty – Hands Up! they yell as they bombard you with questions, twisting metaphors and logic as they go. But then the cracks appear and their perfectly coiffed surfaces begin to implode, with Mary like a little piggy in the middle, torn between adoration and terror. This is fast and furious stuff, very funny and cleverly written, though it does meander a bit when the long lost son turns up. There’s a nice touch of humanity at the end. www.theperformancecorporation.com
Conceived as a working model for a film he might make, Gerardo Naumann’s play is like a prolonged rehearsal, with all the minutia involved in such a project – shooting the lead parts from different angles, using printed t-shirts or slices of (increasingly burnt) toast as storyboards and generally employing the cast of nearly 20 extras as props. Based on an unknown woman’s discarded diary, the story itself is mildly interesting but what tends to hold the attention is the way the extras reveal something of their personalities in the process. Punctuated by occasional live shots from the street, it’s quite clever and at times quite funny, but it’s also a tad self-indulgent and in the end it doesn’t add up to very much. Naumann himself wonders whether it should have in fact been called A Useless Play – draw your own conclusions.
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