From Robert Connor's opening solo, Dance Theatre of Ireland's Soul Survivor, which premiered at the Black Box Theatre on Saturday night, proposed that increasing speed and an overload of information technology turns humans into deskbound, computer-dominated robots.
When J.J. Formento attempts to break away from the asexual routine, in his solo to the singing of Meredith Monk, blips appear on the grid to which the world has been reduced on Tim Redfern's video projection.
Towards the end the music of John Taverner's Leroy Kyrie sees Marc O'Neill's silver-grey science-fiction costumes replaced by loose-fitting white jackets and trousers. Only then do we lose the standardised buildings (seen on screen) while Loretta Yurick and Robert Connor's choreography replaces angles with curves for a return to simple humanity and religious devotion.
There was fine athletic dancing from all the cast (Muirne Bloomer, Stephen Bradley-White and Robert Jackson also having solos), but outstanding was Olwen Grindley, both when a slave to brain overload and when aware she also has a heart and soul.
Fran Hegarty and John Ryan created a collage of electronic sound including the insistent ringing of telephones, combined with music always complementary to the visuals, while Mark Gallione imaginatively lit the space with its red tables, straight-backed chairs and screens, all moved by the dancers.
This piece, running for 70 minutes without interval, shows a different choreographic vocabulary for Connor and Yurick, though still tending to repetition. The character images of dancer-shapes on screen in duet with their counterparts on stage was effective - but the video is overlong and dangerous for epileptics. Indeed, it seemed to leave the whole audience a little dazed.
Soul Survivors returns on September 20th to the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, before playing Coleraine, Sligo, Dublin, Belfast, Tallagh, Letterkenny, Dundrum and Kilkenny, finishing in Ennis- killen on October 30th.