APART FROM entertainment, if the Cork Midsummer Festival offers anything to its audiences it must be the opportunity for a new way of looking, writes MARY LELAND
In visual terms it has hit the streets with Christian Eisenberger's Vietnam Scene. The Austrian artist's installation is based on the resonating photograph from the Vietnam war, that of children stripped naked by napalm racing from their blazing homes. To walk along a city pavement and find oneself confronted with, and engaged by, these figures of terrified despair is to be alerted to art at its most potent.
That this is some cultural distance from the Visible Fictions' co-production of Peter Panwith the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis at the Opera House is a token of the festival's willingness to challenge the mundane and to promote debate and reflection. Unfortunately Peter Pandoesn't live up to this expectation. Even with the support of committed performances and some delightful shadow- puppetry, Douglas Irvine's direction of this story of the boy who doesn't want to grow up seemed to have been infiltrated by writer JM Barrie's confused whimsicality.
Uncertainy of purpose might also define Higgeldy Piggeldyat the Spiegeltent. A cheerful but inane show this targeted the nappy league which turned up in such numbers as to form street-long queues outside and self-service seating inside which eventually led to no seats at all. For no discernible reason the three pigs go to sea and are chased by an octopus which is then dispatched by a pitch invasion of gaily murderous two-and-three year olds. Presented by Cork Circus with a hint of acrobatics and another of juggling, the makeshift production values and lack of a coherent storyline mean that this effort is in sad contrast to what the responsive audience deserves.
Perhaps the festival's discussion sessions (at 9 Chapel St, Shandon) will ponder issues of creative imagination, missing so far from the juvenile programme while abundant in the adult shows. Asylum Productions, for example, are superficially all lights and mirrors, while underneath other observations are at work, and especially so in Red Lolaat the Triskel Arts Centre. There is no script credit for this piece, possibly because not a single word is spoken, but the company's technical credits are building up to an impressive portfolio. Composer Linda Buckley, lighting design by Kath Geraghty, set by Olan Wrynne, costumes by Lisa Zagone and direction by Donal Gallagher come smoothly together in a collaborative of theatre artists.
The play is essentially a visual trick: the two players, meeting and passing at a bus stop , are both back to front, in that the masked face seen by the audience is the back of the actor’s head, the hands opening the newspaper are behind his or her back. This device is so smoothly sustained that the accomplishment never detracts from the story of hopes and misunderstandings expressed in sighs and murmurs by Medb Lambert and Marcus Bale. In a presentation of such polish the fact that it is also rather light in content is irrelevant; the engagement is with what is visible and how it is seen.
The performances of Croi Glan Integrated Dance Company at the Firkin Crane also challenged notions of the probable. The main feature was the interlocking sequence choreographed by David Bolger of CoisCéim, uniting long-limbed dancers with wheelchair users in an arrangement (to a soundtrack including Rufus Wainwright and Nancy Sinatra) mingling movement, song and speech with impressive grace. As choreographers and directors, Kim Epifano and Tara Brandel brought something of an erotic charge to their work, again interweaving the balletic potential of both chair-bound and able-bodied dancers in a reminder that the festival also provides different ways of seeing differences.
Cork Midsummer Festival continues until Sunday. www.corkmidsummer.com
