The past year has seen dancers soldier on in the face of dramatic changes and cutbacks, writes Michael Seaver
Funding cuts leave artistic scars as well as financial deficits, and it seemed that many dance artists raised psychic defences after the Arts Council's decreased Government allocation was passed on to the sector. Dance is fairly battle-hardened in this regard, but there did seem to be a slight feeling of artistic entrenchment about a lot of the work produced this year.
It has also been a year of changes with Michael Klein appointed new artistic director of Daghdha and Finola Cronin in place as dance specialist with the Arts Council. Yoshiko Chuma left Daghdha with her best achievement of her tenure, The Yellow Room, a scatty but rich dance that had a warmth and humour missing from her other works. Part of it's success lay in John Breen's text. Dance Theatre of Ireland's collaboration with Joe O'Byrne in As a Matter of Fact bore similarly rich results, although both text and movement got swamped by seductively slick graphics. Earlier in the year, Pan Pan's Gavin Quinn worked with Rex Levitates as dramaturg on Bread and Circus, but it was the well-judged form and clearly managed tension in the movement that left the strongest mark.
The two productions that were most eagerly anticipated were Coiscéim's Mermaids and Fabulous Beast's Giselle. Both had spectacular settings but for me seemed let down by choreographic decisions. There was a sense that David Bolger was too close to a work that he has wanted to make for some time. It was visually stunning and had a strong sense of place, but the choreographic language seemed underpowered. Giselle was full of cliché and cruelty in a Martin MacDonagh kind of way, but lacked dramatic depth and strong characterisation, although international audiences might not be so critical of it's portrayal of the dysfunctional midlands when the show tours in 2004.
Dance is forcing its way back into festivals and there was a consistency in most of the offerings. Galway Arts Festival had its strongest dance programme in some time with the magnificently imaginative The Junebug Symphony and the madcap circus performers-cum-cavemen of Acrobat.
Things were more mixed at the Dublin Fringe Festival, the highlights of which included Lia Rodrigues's powerful and moving Such Stuff As We Are Made Of and the controlled body of Oguri in the Butoh work Today - A Leaning Axis. Lowlights included the dated physical language in Earthfall's I Can't Stand Up and the dreary Sudden Birds from Yasmeen Godder, from whom much was expected. Irish contributions to the festival were also mixed, the highlights, including Fearghus O Conchúir's Tearmann (which on a second viewing seemed much more relaxed than on opening night), Mairéad Vaughan's It Was All About The Truth and, away from the footlights, Ella Clarke and Julie Lockett's continual explorations of works by Deborah Hay in a grubby upstairs studio in Temple Bar.
Some of the work in the Revolutions programme, which set out to forefront emerging talent, didn't cross the gap between studio and stage, although Lisa McLoughlin's Tender Hooks of Honesty was an impressive, choreographic début and won her the Jane Snow Award.
Another pleasant surprise was Sarpagati at the Pavilion Theatre in August. The effect of Daksha Sheth's mingling of Kathak and contemporary western dance forms with a stunning theatricality and incredible controlled performers caught me off guard and left a lasting impression. On the other hand, Maria Pages came to the Dublin Theatre Festival with a considerable reputation and enhanced it even further with her joyous and brawny Flamenco Republic.
The year will be remembered as a bad year for ballet with cuts to Ballet Ireland and no funding for Cork City Ballet. Both managed to put together divertissement programmes and it was left to foreign companies to present full ballets. The Latvian Ballet trudged through a lifeless Swan Lake in Belfast, the small touring Welsh Ballet created a new production by Darius James called The Lady of the Lake, while the Russian State Ballet recently presented Giselle and The Nutcracker.
The constant repetition of a narrow repertoire of ballet classics is beginning to wear thin so it was interesting to see works by Balanchine and Robert North as part of the Paris Conservatoire's presentation in Cork. That performance once again highlighted the appalling lack of dance training in this country, in spite of the vital work of private dance teachers and schools, youth dance groups and organisation such as Shawbrook.
In other ways, dance is consolidating performance practice with a new journal and book on Irish choreographers from ICD in Cork, the formation of Dance Research Forum Ireland from the International Society of Dance History Scholars' conference in Limerick and contributions to the Arts Council's Critical Voices programme by Kinetic Reflex and Rex Levitates. Also welcome was the rebirth of the Counterbalance Project for able-bodied and disabled dancers, the continuation of the IsaDora Cosmetic's Dancer of the Year Award and moves towards the establishment of a dance centre in Dublin.
