Let's face the Consequences and dance
Consequences is the latest production of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, the Amsterdam-born brainchild of performers Stephen Batts and Ursula Laeubli, which has been based in Londonderry for 10 years while retaining the multi-national make-up of its personnel.
Currently being toured around all corners of Ireland, north and south, under the expert direction of dance theatre cognoscente Wolfgang Hoffmann, this multimedia piece offers content that is not likely to disturb many people's notions of its generic field as one that is mistrustful of verbal intercourse and the written word. In one of few sequences featuring speech, a voice on tape recounts a memory of a letter articulating long-confused emotions coming to clarity – a letter which remains forever unanswered. In another, two converse at a table in German while others race around them, binding them in a chaotic mess of tape as though to demonstrate their becoming stuck in the rut of socially-assigned roles which inhibit true communication.
While these episodes may appear blunt and flat on paper, in execution they are bathed in the glow of a mesmerising dream-logic which seems to melt away the meanings of the bold, masculine, vaguely ominous word which gives the piece its title. A deliberately alienating opening sequence, in which the eyes and ears are presented with too much on which to focus, serves its purpose of 'waking up' an audience from the consensual hallucination of the Real World and guiding it into the province of the subconscious.
While the physical movement on stage runs the gamut from high grace to low gaucheness and is seldom less than fascinating, it is most admirable for the abstract moods it helps to generate – moods for which the warm and evocative guitar and electronic compositions of dancer Daniel Weaver must also take much credit. It is Weaver who all but steals the show with a surreally funny a capella rendition of I'm Through With Love in a beautifully ambient scene involving the hum of an electric fan and the long red hair of Ayesha Mailey.
In the end, the word 'consequences' may strike the spectator only as a semi-ironic comment on what Consequences is – a stream of scenes among which the connections appear less than rigorously defined, less than easily explicable, but which one feels rather more than knows to be wonderfully right.
Peter Millar
Consequences will be performed in the Riverside Theatre, Coleraine, tonight
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Belfast
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
