Dublin Dance Festival 2025: Chora

Chora, by Luail. Image, Patricio Cassinoni

*****

No new undertaking is without its cheerleaders or critics. The policies, practices and price of newly formed Luail, Ireland’s National Dance Company, generating delight and discontent. Its inaugural production, Chora, making history at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, sees Luail making its case. Luail’s artistic director, Liz Roche, never one to shrink from a big occasion, bringing together twelve dancers, three additional choreographers and a superlative Irish Chamber Orchestra, under leader Katherine Hunka, to craft a sublime journey from darkness into light. One whose cathartic release hits you with the force of grace, offering joy, hope, connection and reconnection. Silencing begrudging nay sayers and kicking off Dublin Dance Festival 2025 with a resounding success.

As is usually the case, the programme’s artspeak sells ice to the academics. Framings you won’t remember five seconds after you’ve read them talk of Greek and Irish influences, of a space between here and some vague other world, of ancestral voices, infinite patterns and fractals. What you never forget is what you see and feel. Which, more often than not, transcends such limiting and obscure definitions. Less contrast and compare so much as a triptych of distinct works, Chora’s power is derived from its unity rather than its individual parts as they engage in shared conversation, each informing the whole. Beginning with Invocation by choreographer and Luail Artist in Residence, Mufutau Yusuf. The first of two consecutive works steeped in Goth like shadings. Designer Katie Davenport subsuming stage and costumes in pitch black evoking a liminal space between heaven and earth. Less purgatory so much as a Universal Studios idea of limbo, which ties in with Roche’s otherworldly inspiration. Sinéad McKenna’s superb lighting both complimenting and establishing mood throughout. Here, six dancers, dressed head to toe in black, cower like acolytes whilst a single dancer, her bare arms exposed, face unmasked, commands the space in which they executes a solo. Presently duets and groupings emerge in a flurry of demonic punches, lifts, flails and swirls set against a stirring composition, Dig Deep by Julia Wolfe, steeped in frenetic tension, like a classic Hitchcock score, the whole serving up a demented danse macabre.

Chora, by Luail. Image, Patricio Cassinoni

A light interlude facilitates a transition to Constellations as a black floor covering is rolled away to reveal a blood red floor underneath, the Goth influence once again evident. Nimbus, by Sam Perkins, providing another musical score haunted by tense, sinister overtones until the final moments. Choreographer Liz Roche setting up a choreographic conversation built on pulse and flow as gentle bumps and buffeting allow the body be propelled in patterns suggesting an inevitability that it could never have been otherwise. Dancers leaving and exiting the space pair off into various groupings creating recurring physical motifs: full body embraces, fireman lifts, arms locked at the wrists as bodies pull against each other creating tension. Creating an organic ebb and flow evolving and dissolving like swirls of smoke.

A short intermission precedes a striking contrast, even if a shared choreographic lexicon suggests dynamic links, especially with the preceding work. I Contain Multitudes by choreographers Guy Nader and Maria Campos, inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, saving the best wine till last, though at first you might not think so. Visually, Davenport reveals she is equally gifted when it comes to simple design, as is McKenna's lighting; white floor, see-through gauze concealing live musicians, with dancers dressed in conventional clothing feeling lighter and brighter. Music, based on Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt, rearranged for the Irish Chamber Orchestra by Marjin van Prooijen, reinforcing an energised, playful liveliness. Once again it begins in silence, individual dancers gradually entering the space, engaging in what appears to be an actor’s floor exercise. Walking around randomly and making eye contact, coming together in pairs then parting before endlessly reforming. Just as you start to feel you're being had a single note rings out, introducing a lively music composition as the walking continues. Gradually choreographic phrases emerge, are repeated, and the illusion of casual randomness is revealed to be exactly that as bodies move in near endless motion, uniting and dividing into various groupings with split-second precision. Time, distance, gravity, space enriched with traces of a divine designer placing bodies exactly where they need to be to catch a fall, receive a lift, grab a hand, a foot, before swiftly moving on as a complex interplay unfolds with stirring simplicity. Like watching the universe from God's perspective, or the swirling components of an atom, everything is singular, everything is relational, everything is connected, everything is one. Forever forming, dissolving, and reforming amidst endless variations; your eyes opened wide in astonishment. All breathtakingly, gorgeously executed right up to the spontaneous standing ovation.

Chora, by Luail. Image, Patricio Cassinoni

Individually there are minor issues, such as music, played live onstage, risking expressive domination. Yet, collectively, Chora proves an astonishing achievement. Company dancers Jou-Hsin Chu, Conor Thomas Doherty, Clara Kerr, Sean Lammer, Tom O’Gorman, Hamza Pirimo, Rosie Stebbing, Meghan Stevens, along with dancers Glòria Ros Abellana, Sarah Cerneaux, Jyoti Soni and Alexander de Vires each delivering exquisite performances. Which leads me to gripe about a growing practice in many venues of admitting latecomers and parading them across entire rows, indifferent to audience members and cast, thereby undermining the experience. If any venue can explain to me how they can justify discommoding several hundred audience members and a stage of invested performers to accommodate a couple of latecomers, despite announcements they wouldn’t be admitted once the show had started, I would dearly love to hear it. Especially when there were vacant seats they could've sat in without disturbing anyone. Till someone can give me a rational explanation for this ludicrous and disgraceful practice, should any venue admitting latecomers ask me to move, I will refuse, and I strongly encourage others to do the same. Dance, even more than theatre, deals in visceral, physical immediacy, weaving visual spells brimming with power and enchantment. All beautifully evident in Luail’s sublime Chora. Crafting a spell that should never be broken. Not for anyone. Do not miss this historic, breathtaking production that gets Dublin Dance Festival 2025 off to a flying start. And please, make sure to arrive before the curtain rises.

Chora, by Luail, Ireland’s National Dance Company, with The Irish Chamber Orchestra, premiered at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on May 13th, opening Dublin Dance Festival 2025 before undertaking a limited, national tour.

May 16, National Opera House, Wexford

May 18, The Lyric Theatre, Belfast

May 28, Cork Opera House.

For more information visit Luail or Dublin Dance Festival 2025