Michael Seaver

Did I make you up?

Catapult Dance & Hugh O'Neill

Although the lengthy programme notes describe creative points of departure, the place of arrival in Did I Make You Up? is a simple reflection on love that has a sense of timelessness. Contemporary and old-fashioned speak with equal voice as three lonely individuals bask in the glow of idealised love.

The universal weakness for believing the corny lines from pop is indulged - and ultimately empathised with - in lip-synching renditions of classics such as One Moment in Time and Total Eclipse of the Heart. These seem at odds with the unsweetened musical language of Hugh O'Neill, whose impressive score - adapted from Robert Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und leben - provided a suitably glacial momentum to the movement. Soprano Deirdre Moynihan was statuesque but soothingly mellow in the twisted melodic lines of the original, while all around her Mercedes Carroll (double bass), Cathal Roche (clarinet and baritone sax), Nelida Bejar (piano) and Keith O'Brien (live electronics) were eager collaborative partners in the action.

But the real strength of the work lies in the dancing. Katherine O'Malley, Thomas Hauser and Stéphane Hisler were outstanding in embodying the knife edge between hope and hopelessness with a crisp but emotionally loaded physicality.

They were helped by Rebecca Walter's choreography - probably her best to date - which was tightly focused in its construction. Restricting herself to a narrow range of movements, she constantly directs the action towards the audience as if the three dancers are desperate to tell us their plight. Within Lian Bell's domestic setting of asymmetrical twine walls and the temperament-changing lighting of Aedín Cosgrove, the dancers disappear into individual corners to mull over their love. Reading a book on babies, dancing alone with a bedroom-sized disco ball, or watching a video of idealised love - their loneliness only finds final release in a climactic succession of duets. There are no happy endings as partners are swapped and each duet keeps repeating back on itself in a holding pattern of despair. It's this self-deluding chase for the ideal that is laid bare in answer to the question, "did I make you up?"

October 20, 2007

Project Arts Centre | Catapult Dance