Blame game
Belfast International Arts Festival
THE dance piece Blame Game, an engaging new work from Kundle Cru with Crying Out Loud, has acquired a new topicality with its debut in The Belfast International Arts Festival at the weekend.
At the start, the nine dancers do a bit of improv on what to call an exceptional human being.
"The sort of person who takes the lost umbrella all the way to the bus depot to return it," opines one. "Special," starts someone else, only to be shot down.
Later, after a man has heroically climbed a wobbly pole to the ceiling of the vast hangar they're performing in, there is some chat about money woes. Somebody does a bluesy snatch about not having the money and the previous athletic performance turns massively metaphoric. Without cash, we're dancing above the abyss like the man on high.
Before this, we had some gorgeous sequences of dance choreographed by Mateusz Szczerak and Alessia Matta.
The 'everyday Wombles' performing, to borrow another term they found for special people, turned their hands, feet and everything in between to joyous use when they acted like grown-up kids taking a game of Twister off the floor.
The group includes three Irish dancers – Angelique Ross, Michelle Thoburn and Ronan Jenkinson – who came into the company through the Belfast Circus School.
There were nice pas de deux, stand-offs and wondering. To be honest, the words were weaker than the moves, with slightly banal aphorisms on the nature of change ("Change is acceptance, and it's a reluctance to move forward..."), which were not as good as the female performer's expressive dance. She embodied the points better.
The musical choices, though, were outstanding with one sequence danced to a kind of ambient Steve Reich/Philip Glass-like score.
Towards the end, the group reassembled, with individual dancers doing their own thing. It looked like a decently functioning society, with all of us able to take on individual roles while remaining within the harmonious group. One can only wish.
Jane Hardy