Far...behind on just about all counts

Okay, ultra brief now as I have decided, in between the summer showers, to embrace my status as worst festival blogger. Ever.

Forgive me, you most honoured hordes who - in your fives and tens – descend upon this site daily…

Loin…(Far…), Rachid Ouramdane’s beautiful multimedia performance meditated - through audio and video testament, interwoven with poetry and movement - on the far-reaching and subtly corrosive effects of violence. The psychic fissures, the intergenerational silences, the disorientation of displacement and the vertiginous state of being neither this nor that – all were handled deftly and intelligently.

It was a work that was - as Helen Meany put it in the post-show discussion - complex, layered and beautiful. Many of the themes touched on could not help but resonate with an Irish audience – war, colonisation and how conflict and suffering on a collective scale impacts uniquely on each family and individual. Not to mention how one’s identity is found, indeed largely created, at the point where two people meet. Now, as Rachid himself said, it is stating the obvious to say this – to say that identity is shaped by context. But it interests him and, to his credit, the work that resulted from his interest held mine. Perhaps that’s because, as he put it, he prefers to get specific to the individuals from whom he draws his material, attempting to revisit the facts of ‘History’ through familial accounts and recollections of those same events. And, what’s just as interesting, how these memories and stories are often never passed on from the elder generation to the younger; how, sometimes, it’s easier to tell them to a stranger. To one who does not know you as the kind, respectable person you appear now. One who you do not care might look differently at you and think worse of you, upon hearing of all you did or all that was done to you...because sometimes, amnesia is the wisest way to remember your past for the future. And there was a quiet poignancy and dark truth here. Anyone whose family has been caught up in anything like this, knows this aspect of war’s aftermath.

Any concerns? Well, I worried at times if it was overall a little too light in touch. I wondered if the emotional distance that can attend the use of image projection might derail things. And I questioned whether Rachid himself, beautiful a performer as he is, was almost a little too cool in his presence. But, to be honest, I’ve easily pushed these aside. Even if it was not a piece that offered any shocking revelations or demanded of me a profound reconsideration of reality, it was aesthetically striking, quietly intelligent and emotionally engaging.

Okay, off to see a few more tonight: Miniatures and Work in Regress.

And, oh, if you’re there and know me…please, don’t let me drink anything.