Although more used to playing outdoors in Temple Bar, the young Rex Levitates company score considerable theatrical kudos in staging two rather mysterious pieces of contemporary dance, collectively titled Blush, and created by 25-year old choreographer Liz Roche. The first, Shhh, is a dramatic duet for two female dancers, who patrol and nudge each other into self-awareness, falling into and away from each other. Lisa McLoughlin dances a waifish, wallflowerish character who wants to escape into the torpor of her private world; while Roche's statuesque dancer-sister Jenny powerfully overarches, amuses and protects her.
There's enormous fluidity and dynamism to the rhythms, which are occasionally accelerated or dramatised by ragtime, French fatale chanson or tango. They provide the tone and vocabulary of the second, more substantial piece, To Time Taking Blush. Once again, the piece emerges through the dangling belch of a smoke machine, and benefits a lot from Nick McCall's lighting and costumes originally designed by Phyllis Byrne of Dundee - hoop dresses worn by the four women and, curiously, one of the two men.
Supposedly inspired by Fauvist painters, it starts and finishes with a dramatic, red-against-blue image of a doll-like ballerina, revealed by the opening of back-curtains so vast they make the dancers resemble music-box miniatures.
Despite the constant flurries of movement, the dancers seem to battle against inertia, huddling into sleepy piles, until the pinching games begin, and they pull each other into drowsy wrestling, lifting, rolling, pulling, pushing and trading weight. There is something gently hypnotic and oddly affecting about the images: the woman disturbed while her male partner sleeps; a beautifully sticky sexual encounter; two women dancers coming downstage into white light with their arms outstretched and calmly regarding the audience, before being forced down by other dancers.
I have seen more energetic work by the Roches (Liz's brother Denis provides electronic music) but they are developing an extraordinarily subtle gestural language here, although it is hard to know what they are getting at dramatically. You sometimes wish they would be bolder with their visual statements - but, heck, this is certainly auspicious.
At the Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin, until tomorrow. Box office: 00 353 1 608 2461.
