David Bolger has distinguished himself as a movement director with a knack for the large-scale: recent projects include Sophie's Choice at the Royal Opera House and Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy at the NT. His latest, in contrast, is a lovely site-specific miniature: a 40-minute dance duet for himself and Diane O'Keeffe, performed in the bar of the Peacock Theatre, which produced the piece along with Bolger's own CoisCéim Dance Theatre.
Chairs and tables have been cleared out, and the audience follows the performers as the action moves throughout the space. Deceptively simple, it's a boy-meets-girl love story, infused with a playful and knowing regard for the everyday. Bolger and O'Keeffe are slender, attractive, and move well, but still look and move like ordinary people; they wear modified street clothes, including lettered T-shirts that say: "I am a dancer. This is my costume." She is a bored bar assistant, sweeping the floor, pacing, and hoisting herself on and off the counter with increasing impatience, accompanied by the sound of a ticking clock. He arrives looking for a drink, and they do a little dance-flirting until he is rewarded with a cold beer. Recorded music starts: they dance separately, stepping around, over and through brooms without letting go, before they get "swept away" by their attraction and start to dance together.
What stops the piece from being cloying is the credibility of the performers' mutual attraction: they perform in an eye-lock, and touch each other with gentleness and care. Increasingly abstracted choreography nonetheless extends a clear narrative line: they separately climb up the walls of a narrow corridor, and find their way down by helping each other; he rolls out a red carpet and arranges white lights on it while she plays a tune on a cello.
The final dance passage asks an unspoken question: how many ways can we move separately and together without unlacing our arms? Not a bad metaphor for commitment.
· Until November 29. Box office: 00353-1-878-7222.
