Subtle programming by Dublin Dance Festival director brought hidden gems and delight to the audiences that dared

ONE OF the trademarks of the departing Dublin Dance Festival director is her understated approach, and often Laurie Uprichard’s subtle programming introduced audiences to unfamiliar works and companies.

This meant that the festival was teeming with “sleepers”, shows which carried no mass advance hype but which then produced a spontaneous buzz of their own and audiences taking a chance.

But on her watch this year, one of the most surprising events of the festival happened when she was able to partner Grand Canal Theatre with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, and last week saw a record audience of 1,800 people for a single contemporary dance show. Looking out on this modern edge of the city, reclaimed and regenerated, it brought back the importance of that first festival in 2002, when Merce Cunningham and his company majestically inhabited the stage of the Abbey Theatre and brought dance centre-stage to the city.

Cloud Gate certainly dominated the second phase of the festival. Although in town for one night only, the heat was on to see the how the Asian strand of the festival might rise to a crescendo in Lin Hwai-Min's Songs of the Wanderers– and of course, there was those 3,000kg of rice. While Eiko and Koma had set the tone in the first few days, and the fine shadow puppetry of classica Javanese dance in Mugiyono Kasido's Bagaspati was a small gem, this show promised spectacle.

In its epic presentation it did not disappoint, with a magically visual production and technical creativity enhancing the 20 dancers who exploited all their martial arts, meditative and modern dance skills to the sonorous and portentous folk songs of Georgia sung by the Rustavi Choir.

The first trickle of rice grains hit the stage like small pebbles of rain, in fact they were heard before they were seen, falling steadily in a narrow column of yellow light drizzling down the head and body of the motionless Buddhist monk figure, calm and impervious. But there were other images in this dance symbolising a journey of ritual and purification, of individual angst and communal support, where large flaming bowls of oil – borne by these disciplined graceful dancers emerging from the dark – each rested on a human pillar, the head of another dancer. When the storm broke, it was electric; cascades of grains falling down a waterfall of burnished golden light, veiling the stage in a moving curtain – the brilliant design of the late Chang Tsan-tao.

But if that was the visual heavyweight, the emotional impact was happening in the small spaces. José Navas, with his intimate and personally revealing show Personaeat the Project, nearly stole the festival with his short interpretative personal dances to seven pieces of music which ran the gamut from Patti Smith to Ravel. Even the pauses between the pieces where the choreographer/performer changes clothes and persona added an engagement. The fragility and personal vulnerability in his solo to the excerpt from Verdi's Forza del Destino, his body curled on the ground, naked and exposed, was an enduring image.

A close encounter with physicality and grace emerged too in the second show for children at the Ark, especially No Man is an Islandby Erik Kaiel, with one dancer using the other as a dancing space, but with care and ingenuity, mesmerising the audience.

Lack of care and humanity might be the accusation hurled at the two most personally political pieces in the festival; both of of which were Irish.

Listowel Syndromeby Emma Martin in Re-Presenting Ireland – the programme of curated new work from Ireland – which explores the ostracism of a woman who dares to name her sexual predator in a small community. But, towering over all for intensity was Tabernacle, the final show of the festival in which choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir bravely steps into the minefield of the Irish body and its bruising and confusing encounters with the power of Catholic Church.

If Songs of the Wanderersrepresented a cleansing ritual, the healing catharsis is not quite there yet in this challenging and disturbing work. Familiar religious iconography; sexuality, innocent and manipulative; isolation and acceptance; authority and compliance, they are all there in a layered work that is subtle, a little overlong, but with Iarla Ó Lionáird's voice an eerie supplication for release, this work will surely merit a wider audience.