Spreading across the city in open air-performances, installations and re-purposed performance spaces, Cork Midsummer festival returns with an impressively ambitious programme of new work. Responding to global environmental disasters and displacement by war, many of the productions invite audiences to lift their gaze from their immediate concerns and imagine themselves in another person’s skin.
In a warehouse by the docks (Warehouse @Marina Market) Company Philip Connaughton presents a new dance theatre work, Trojans, a thrillingly contemporary response to Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid. Surrounded by four enormous screens, dancers hurl themselves fearlessly on a bare concrete floor, jostling, rolling and clambering over each other in jolting sequences of movement. Fleeing war, on a voyage to what may be a new homeland, they are tested to see if they can survive the gruelling journey and hold on to a belief in a cause bigger than themselves. Carrying each other, walking on each other’s backs and lifting their queen (Joanna Banks) proudly on their shoulders, this international group of performers – Sheik Bah, Vitor Bassi, Alexandra Karcakova, Sarah Ryan, Anna Kaszuba and Dmitry Vinokurov – form a riveting ensemble. Connaughton’s direction maintains an emotional pitch throughout, enhanced by Luca Truffarelli’s confrontational video design and composer Oberman Knocks’ electronica score.
Six months travel in search of adventure go wrong in ways playwright and actor Georgina Miller could never have imagined. In her autobiographical show, Freefalling (Everyman theatre) from Rough Magic and Lime Tree theatre/Belltable, she uses aerial dance to evoke memories of an exotic trip spent parachuting and diving with sharks in south-east Asia. Initially carefree, Miller soars above the stage twisting and flying through the air, recalling her escape from recession-bound Ireland in her 30s.
Self-deprecating and droll, she recalls sudden physical incapacity with understatement, as her dream of a Samoan idyll is derailed by terrifying spinal pain and paralysis. As her endurance of limited medical facilities is about to be relieved with a rescue airlift from Samoa, the island is devastated by an earthquake, followed by a tsunami. Lynne Parker’s direction, evocative sound design by Fiona Sheil and brilliant aerial choreography from Chantal McCormick elevate this charming if baggy tale into a buoyant reflection on an extreme experience of gaining new perspectives on the world.
A self-doubting young actor’s new assignment becomes dangerous in writer Rosa Mäkelä’s portrayal of a coercive relationship in This Is You (The Crypt, St Luke’s) from recently formed theatre company, Loom. When Alice (played by Mäkelä) agrees to move into a wealthy middle-aged man’s house to impersonate his estranged, long-absent daughter, Melissa, she chooses to ignore the risks involved. Scrolling through screen images of Melissa and cinema stars from the past, an alternative identity seems seductive to her.
A premise that hints at true-crime style macabre takes a more intriguing turn under Éadaoin Fox’s direction, especially in one tightly wound scene of mind-games over dinner. While the pained father, Carl (Michael Sands) tries to rewrite the past, Alice switches between second guessing him to resisting his attempts to control her. Although diluted by some awkward physical staging in the cavernous space, the competing versions of reality unfold to create teasingly ambiguous drama.
