Noctu

The most thrilling dancing I’ve seen on stage this year was in Noctu, an Irish dance musical play, conceived and directed by Brendan de Gallai. The advance PR—stating that it had been created by a former star of Riverdance—didn’t excite me, because I’d found Riverdance to be too slick, mechanical, and repetitive for my own tastes. But this eclectic new touring show is fresh and filled with life. While it is clearly rooted in traditional Irish dance, it also draws freely upon modern dance and pop culture; and it is constantly surprising. The creator has written that his goal is “to tell the story of Irish dance from the viewpoint of the dancer. Through movement, narrative, parody, comedy and pathos, this Irish dance play will deliver powerful performances through text and dance.”

The show is very well paced, beginning in a casual, offhand way that draws us in. We first see the dancers arriving strolling down the aisles onto the stage, greeting each other, warming up, and getting into costume (to a modern recording by Mary Coughlin of Billie Holiday’s infectious version of “Miss Brown to You”). With wildly varied music (by Kate Bush, Bjork, Leonard Cohen and others), dancers share dreams and anxieties, largely through movement, all-too-rarely via spoken words. (I would have welcomed more spoken word; I was intrigued hearing, for example, one dancer’s reflections on dealing with homophobia in his youth.) There are 16 dancers; the star, Callum Spencer of England, has enormous stage presence. The show’s lightest, most playful bit (danced to “Getting Some Fun Out of Life,” sung by Madeline Peyroux) is followed—to brilliant effect—by dancing of savage intensity (to Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite”) and Joe Csibi’s “Underworld”).

Chip Deffaa
Cabaret Scenes
September 28, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org