Change
Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2
★★★★☆
Hope is not a passive feeling; it is a practice. Croí Glan, Ireland’s disabled-led dance company, bring that conviction to life in Change. This vibrant interdisciplinary performance asks not only what we have lost to climate change but also what we might still save.
Drawing inspiration from Rebecca Solnit’s Not Too Late and Christiana Figueres’s The Future We Choose, the piece combines movement, sound and light to deliver a call to action rooted in both urgency and optimism.
What strikes first is the space itself. Performers do not just move across it but claim it, turning the stage into a shared ground of visibility and existence. Their bright costumes sometimes evoke the five cosmic elements but also recall the stubborn debris of human-made waste clinging to the planet.
The diverse performers move with remarkable fluidity, sometimes conjoined in sync and sometimes apart, celebrating difference while embodying a unity of purpose. A patchwork of dance traditions, layered with engaging music, lends the piece a poetic flow, pulling the audience between tension and release.
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Sound fragments punctuate the movements with reminders of the crisis: capitalism’s accelerating damage. The haunting refrain “Do they not know?” reverberates as a challenge both to those in power and to us in the audience. The breaking and rebuilding symbolised through thin metal rods and crutches emphasise the power within and extend the performers’ reach, almost as if to break the fourth wall and demand introspection.
Visually, the production is dazzling. A looming gigantic pile of rubbish dominates the space, casting shadows that seem to fuse past and present. The lighting design amplifies this tension.
There are points when the show feels stretched, its momentum slackening before regaining focus. However, its message resonates, asserting, “Climate action is a love story.”
Change is less a lecture than an invitation to act, to connect and to imagine a common future worth saving.
