Irish Times critic, Belinda McKeon reviews Open Source at the Black Box Theatre in Galway
Open Source at the Black Box Theatre, Galway
Belinda McKeon
As the audience files in to the stark space of the Black Box, the performers of the Irish-Icelandic co-production, Open Source, cross the vast stage repeatedly, moving to its edge to shrug off the austere suits they are wearing, and to add them to the wide line of discarded clothes that lies there. Meanwhile, the phrases that come over the speakers are in a language which sounds alien and impenetrable. Icelandic poetry? Lines from Norse sagas? Then the penny drops, as the ear adapts; and the eye adapts along with it.
Those are snatches of Irish, the most rudimentary of utterances. In a fine opening moment, Paul Keogan's long brace of light trundles swiftly over the performers, and back again, casting them in that tension between vivid illumination and vaguer shadow, between the anecdotal and the abstract, upon which this piece pivots - at times superbly, at other points more stiltedly.
To blame for the latter is a structure into which the assimilation of the elements that make up the work - dance, acting, music, and film - seems uncertain, or even somehow unfinished. It's not that the piece lacks coherence - under the direction and choreography of Helena Jonsdottir, the five performers effect a powerful stage presence, ably interweaving themes of language and literacy, of identity and dependency.
The cast is a mix of dancers and actors, and, while this difference can be problematic, especially when all five are required to move fluidly as a whole, for the most part the marriage of Lynn Cahill and Enda Kilroy with dancers Cameron Corbett, Mike Winter and Rachel Wynne is a fruitful one.
Together, they handle gracefully the piece's many moments of startling visual beauty, interacting both with the physical elements of the stage and with the narrative traces in the text to produce some truly wonderful images. As Kilroy and Cahill verbally dissect the art of writing, for example, the dancers become embodiments of what they describe, of representation, translation, editing.
Most brilliant of all is a scene where Wynne rises high on a full skirt wound from the cast-off garments, a kaleidoscope of light shimmering on the screen behind her like an Icelandic sky.
It's a pity, then, that the bridges between these striking moments are dramatically weak, seeming at times more academic than artistic, particularly in the early stages. Open Source is explicit about its desire to reach out to, and include, the audience in its evolution; something it achieves memorably at its close, but less successfully in the journey there.
