Cork City Ballet:Ballet Spectacular 2003Cork Opera House
At the Grande Finale of this Ballet Spectacular from Cork City Ballet I felt like thanking the Canon for the use of the hall. The arts in Cork are not necessarily analogous to the state of the arts in Ireland as a whole, but there can be few demonstrations of the chasm between the quality of performance and the availability of resources as this display of individual excellence in a setting which to call unadorned would be an exaggeration of its simplicity. Highly professional dancers, costumed to the peak of personal performance values, give their technical best without sets, without any atmosphere other than that provided by Paul Denby's somewhat erratic lighting, to taped music and against a backcloth on which colour changes cannot hide the stains. This is poverty. The injustice of such penury - a condition emphasised by the bleak auditorium - is grossly obvious when the contemporary work of Jane Kellaghan of Cork City Ballet can be shown as extending the internalised explorations of dance going on at the ICD Firkin Crane, a short distance away and operating in an almost equally functional environment. The possibility of such a balletic relationship, surely significant to the future of modern dance in Ireland, is hinted at in this presentation where, as usual, Alan Foley has mustered a cohesive corps de ballet and a team of visiting artists whose classical expertise - honed from the best Russian schools and infused with personal dedication and understanding - offers a glittering reminder of what dance still has to offer. Elsewhere.
In Cork, by now, audiences hardly even remember where to applaud. Two-thirds of them under 16, fortified by bottles of Coca-Cola and rustling bags of sweets, they are even losing the idea of how to behave in a theatre. It may seem unfair to Ilya Chitov, Irina Sitnikova, Chika Temma, Zhanat Atymtayev, Veronika Ivanova and Monica Loughman not to be more particular about their style, their lyricism, their seasoned brilliance. But there is no emotion here - even Loughman's Dying Swan is more a matter of exquisite arm movements than pathos - because there is no context.
Just thanks to the Canon for the use
of the hall . . .
