Irish Times critics review Trigger at the Project Cube; Trilok Gurtu at the NCH, Dublin and Queen's Consort, and Gamelan Widya Santi at Whitla Hall, Belfast
Trigger at the Project Cube
Mingling with the interval audience made you glad you chose the dance show Trigger. They were only halfway through their story but you had witnessed two already; concise and lean pieces that set out to make a point through the immediacy of movement and sound.
Choreographer Maireád Vaughan performed her own Matra along with composer Dara O'Brien who sat cross-legged at the side of the stage, attentively following her movement with vocal sounds which he then manipulated electronically. His sound score, along with Eamon Fox's lighting, created an environment that heightened the sense of isolation in the solo dancer.
But the correspondences between the music and the dance were small-scale and there was a reliance on changes in lighting to create large formal structures for the piece. Although the gestural vocabulary of classical Indian dance sustained interest there was a feeling of more theatricality to be explored.
More Below then Above by Julie Lockett had a far better sense of itself. Dancers Emma O'Kane and Katherine O'Malley are co-existing in the space, aware only of their immediate sensory environment. Their bodies are in a constant state of imbalance, hips buckling to the side and throwing the upper body out of kilter while arms softly flail to sustain balance. Some rare moments of balance and suspension do occur, in particular a low arabesque by Emma O'Kane, but it seems much later that Eoin O'Brien's soundscape lulls and the pair sit side by side on the ground with their hands gathering the energy around their outstretched legs. This concurrence and an ensuing touch between hands have consequences for the dynamic of the duet that only reaches a conclusion right at the end. There is simplicity in the language and choreographic craft that transcends any superficial reading of the duet and allows many levels of meaning to be chosen by the viewer.
After these two affirmations of the primacy of movement, Rebecca Walter's Please Put Your Wild Finger Away seemed almost trite with its heavy reliance on text. Blending cooking instructions and movement to explore relationships, it was difficult to see how the movement vocabulary fitted into the narrative. The metaphor might have worked in the head but it didn't seem to work in the body.
Runs until Saturday
Michael Seaver
Trilok Gurtu at the NCH, Dublin
Anyone who has experienced the majesty of Indian tabla master and percussionist Trilok Gurtu will testify to the primal power of the drums. From Bombay, Gurtu's exploits with Don Cherry, Gilberto Gil and Bill Laswell, as well as his seminal contributions to the John McLaughlin Trio, have sealed his reputation as a rhythm master.
In Dublin as part of the World Masters series presented by Walton's New School of Music, Gurtu gave a good-humoured, virtuoso display of what he terms "mass-ical" music; sounds for the masses rather than the classes. Accompanied by Ravi Chary on sitar, London-based vocalist Roop Kumar and Jerry Lipkins (keyboards and samples), Gurtu's skills allow him to fuse and blend a mouth-watering selection of styles, from the traditional wash of fluid Indian and silky African rhythms to out-there drum-shaped sounds, wonderfully eclectic patterns and waywardly melodic textures.
A pity then that the venue's sound system was wholly inadequate for this performance. Whatever about the muddy, stolid, leaden sound those in the stalls had to endure, heaven only knows how the players felt. You could judge their growing frustration in the quantity (and quality) of hand-signals directed from the stage to various technicians during the course of the performance.
Yet despite this, Gurtu's ensemble did shake some magic from the proceedings. A hypnotic rendition of Eastern Journey allowed the group to sketch out a fusion which coiled from soft Indian whispers to more layered and driving funk. While some of the ensemble pieces suffered a little from a heavy reliance on samples, you couldn't say the same thing about Gurtu's two solo runs.
The verve, complexity, inventiveness and execution of these pieces showed just why the percussionist is so highly regarded. What started with Gurtu tinkering with his kit (including all manner of bells and gongs) built into a storm of masterly rhythm, incorporating displays of human beatboxery (usually the confine of hip-hop acts), intricate tabla playing and highly involved drumming. As drum solos go, you'd listen to them again and again.
Jim Carroll
Queen's Consort, and Gamelan Widya Santi at Whitla Hall, Belfast
One: Many - Rachel Holstead
Born in Co Kerry, Rachel Holstead is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied composition with Kevin O'Connell and Donnacha Dennehy, and is now a PhD student at Queen's University Belfast's School of Music, where she is studying composition with Dr Michael Alcorn.
Queen's University's Whitla Hall is just the venue for her new multi-ensemble piece One: Many. The work needs an area which can accommodate two groups of singers, four spatially-distributed percussionists, a solo flute, an oboe and a double bass, also widely dispersed, and a Balinese Gamelan, all balanced electronically.
The combination of so many noise-making agents could have been overwhelming, but one was struck instead by Holstead's control of her forces and the coherence of the result which also reflects well on the student performers and the sound diffusion, credited to DJ Carl.
Although influenced by traditional music in her early work, Holstead's latest music aims for a more abstract form of expression, and while one could perhaps cite precedents in Varèse, among others, for the wind arabesques and the percussion ostinati, the Balinese gamelan is used entirely as a sonic resource without obvious reference to traditional styles. The various episodes of this single-movement piece contrast and combine solo instruments, solo and choral singing and the percussion groups in ways which are sometimes powerful and stimulating, sometimes beguiling, but always direct and expressive.
There is no denying the creative purpose which can sustain a piece of such potentially heterogeneous elements for 45 minutes without strain.
Dermot Gault
