BWW Reviews: Condemnation and Escape Encased in Liz Roche's BASTARD AMBER

In W.B. Yeats's poem Sailing to Byzantium, published in 1928, condemnation rings from the outset: "That is no country for old men". The work stands as one of the poet's lasting pronouncements about the agony of old age and envy of the immortality of art. Similarly, the damning title of Liz Roche's new dance performance, co-produced with Dublin Dance Festival and the Abbey Theatre, contains some outrage towards artifice ('bastard amber' is actually a type of lighting gel). When we reach the idyllic Byzantium, will our souls be set free?

On entering the auditorium, famous words from legendary director Peter Brook are already projected onto the back wall of the theatre: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage". There might be a confluence of East and West then in projecting similar set descriptions from Yeats's Noh-inspired Dreaming of the Bones, adding that "a screen with a pattern of mountain and sky can stand against the wall, or a curtain with a like pattern hang upon it, but the pattern must only symbolize or suggest". True to this, Paul Will's stage scenery is more autonomous than representative, with neat panels of plastic hovering onstage that spend most of the performance high above the action, sometimes cutting the lighting to create abstract patterns.

A sparkling cloth of gold foil is unfolded and wrapped around a dancer's body, its reflective surface, under Lee Curran's holy lamps, sending amber ripples across the stage. The image becomes almost violent with the body smothered under its folds, signaling a conflict between artist and artifice. It's also a sly reference to the opening of another of Yeats's plays for dancers, At the Hawk's Well, the conventions of which are replicated further in the casting of four musicians. Roche's mystic movements are set to Ray Harman's tribal score, breathed to life by Bryan O'Connell's booming percussion, Zoë Conway's scratchy violin, and John McIntyre's guitar mimicking the refrain of a Muezzin prayer.

The international company of dancers has to negotiate not only the material but the immaterial. Liv O'Donoghue's command is shamanistic, vibrating as if trying to expel an inner essence. In Roche's choreography the soul weighs heavy on the body but also vice versa, with both pulling the other in different directions.

A stunning golden disc descending from the ceiling could be taken directly from the lauded collections of Irish artist Patrick Scott (another cited influence). On reaching Byzantium, movements become celebratory but also stiffer and dutiful, as if preferring the fate predicted by Yeats in his poem: becoming a bird "to keep a drowsy emperor awake". It feels like a satire of utopia from a choreographer whose past work has often given gesture to the outsider in an imperfect world.

Roche's spirit quest is a lament for perfection but it might succeed in granting the extended existence yearned in the lines that inspired it. While the ephemerality of performance may not preserve, the memories of the spectator certainly will, and from a haunting and glowing tableau where dancers use their bodies to create still frames of each other, the artist may very well escape into eternity.

Bastard Amber runs at the Abbey Theatre until 27 May, and tours to Kilkenny Arts Festival in August. For more information see lizrochecompany.com. Photo by Luca Truffarelli.

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