14-05-2025
Dublin Dance Festival 2025: At Chora, generations of choreographers, dancers and producers witness an auspicious debut
Chora
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
A notable slice of Irish dance history appears at the unveiling of
Luail
, the new national dance company, on Tuesday. Generations of choreographers, dancers and producers – including members of Irish National Ballet from the 1970s and 1980s, the last time Ireland had a full-time dance company – eagerly witness the opening night of Chora.
Irish National Ballet's last production was Oscar, a ballet based on Oscar Wilde that it performed with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in 1989. Picking up the baton 36 years later, Luail has partnered with the Irish Chamber Orchestra in three works, the orchestra energetically part of the movement fabric onstage rather than tucked away in the pit.
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Behind the scenes at Luail as Ireland's national dance company prepares to open Dublin Dance Festival
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As a full-time company Luail will be judged on its coherence, how it is more than just a collection of individuals thrown together for a production. Superficially that coherence can be measured by how razor-sharp the dancers move in unison.
Liz Roche, the company's artistic director, resists the temptation of a slick, easy-to-digest premiere, instead bringing three dances that celebrate the intangible: the word 'chora', drawn from classical Greek philosophy, refers to an in-between space, not quite real, not quite abstract. In response the dancers coalesce not just in movement but with less discernible collective energy. The unison isn't just visual but visceral.
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Set on risers at the back of the stage, the orchestra reach their most physical presence when performing Julia Wolfe's Dig Deep, accompanying Mufutau Yusuf's brooding Invocation. Continuing the choreographer's artistic path in exploring ritual and reconnection with the past, the black-clad dancers display physical intensity, individuals flinging arms as if casting off the past or swarming in groups loaded with uncertainty.
Roche's Constellations is a quieter meditation on shared space and interaction. Dressed in teal, pale chartreuse and grey, the dancers walk on stage and pause when encountering one another, the gentle disruption either ignored or acknowledged, often with hugs or by holding hands and counterbalancing each other.
These dissipate as quickly as they appear as the ever-changing energy in the space – supported by Sam Perkin's evolving score – becomes defined by the different encounters, whether one to one or collective dancing in a tight circle of light, like at a club.
There's the same sense of mapped energies in I Contain Multitudes, by Guy Nader and Maria Campos, performed to the composer Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato. Here the bodies are more instrumental and interactions more Newtonian. Dancers are less people, more moving beings that interact through physics rather than emotional attraction.
The music is similarly impersonal, with looping five-count phrases that drive the walking concentric circles into eddies of intense movement: individuals are held by an arm and leg and spun in circles, jessant bodies flung into the air and then caught by fellow dancers.
Each interaction demands precision and, most importantly trust, both evident throughout.
Chora is an auspicious beginning for Luail and its dancers, Jou-Hsin Chu, Conor Thomas Doherty, Clara Kerr, Sean Lammer, Tom O'Gorman, Hamza Pirimo, Rosie Stebbing and Meghan Stevens; plus guest dancers Glòria Ros, Sarah Cerneaux and Alexander De Vries.
Alongside full-throttled playing from the musicians, Katie Davenport's staging and costumes and Sinéad McKenna's lighting design are understated but perfectly apposite, reflecting the evening's aesthetic self-confidence.
Chora will be performed at
National Opera House
, Wexford, on Friday, May 16th;
Lyric Theatre
, Belfast, on Sunday, May 18th; and
Cork Opera House
, on Wednesday, May 28th
