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Dancehall Blues

 
Stephanie Green Review by Stephanie Green 4 Published: 20 Aug 2025 Assembly @ Dance Base Show Dates: 12 Aug 2025-24 Aug 2025

Brilliant and ambitious in its range, Dancehall Blues combines dance, text, voiceover and film. It is choreographed, with input from the dancers, by the acclaimed David Bolger of Dublin’s CoisCéim company, whose work has appeared at the Sydney Opera House and the Venice Biennale. This is dance theatre for our difficult times. Yet anger is tempered with lyricism and, surprisingly, the magic – perhaps illusory – of a burgeoning love affair, symbolised by a dance hall mirrorball.

Dance theatre for our difficult times

Set in a fictional 2030, it harks back to Orwell’s dystopian 1984. The two dancers first appear clad in hazmat suits, suggesting a post-nuclear apocalypse has occurred. Film projected on the back wall shows crowds and police in riot gear with shields. It is then revealed that the couple are in a dilapidated hall, possibly a former dance hall. The mirrorball makes a dramatic entrance. Throughout, sirens wail and the noise of angry crowds reminds us – in between the more playful and hopeful relationship developing – of the threatening world outside.

The two dancers complement each other beautifully. Emily Kilkenny Roddy is more lyrical, while Alex O’Neill is a bad boy from hip hop, street dance and jazz. Yet she can rise playfully to match him, and there is great chemistry between them. Delightful angular armography is topped by witty chairography. O’Neill is mesmerising: angry, expressive and endlessly inventive, his rapid movements include krumping, chest popping, swinging arms and contorted fingers, but he can also melt into the lyrical love duets. Their relationship has an ambivalent edge, though. Is it real or imagined? A large gilt-framed mirror, tipped forward, projects images of the dancers in hazmat gear alongside the reflection of their ordinary attire, suggesting the world of the mirrorball – and of their love – is illusion.

John Gunning’s lighting design is striking. The stunning music and sound design by Ivan Birthistle creates atmosphere, from a thudding bass to Pergolesi’s uplifting Stabat Mater sung by Philippe Jaroussky, and finally Jacques Brel’s sentimental, quintessentially French Ne me quitte pas. The show ends on a note of hope. The couple finally take ballroom hold – so clever to leave this to the end – and waltz around the lowered mirrorball, spinning and twinkling until its scattered light fills the space. A magical, ecstatic ending.

With a bit of tightening of the hazmat beginning and some longueurs between the action, this could be a five-star show.

Amir Nisi

Stephanie Green

Stephanie Green has reviewed Theatre and Dance in Edinburgh since 2011 but previously travelled widely, mainly in Eastern Europe and Russia, writing about puppetry. She also studied shadow puppetry and sacred dance in Bali. In the 1970s, she trained as a puppeteer at the Little Angel, London and later worked at the alternative In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. After training at the Place, the London School of Contemporary Dance, in her 20s she then gave up dancing until starting again in her 60s just for fun. She has recently danced in a community group with Barrowland Ballet (at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2013), Oceanallover and at the South Bank, London as part of the Festival of the Silver Age. She is also a novelist, playwright and poet. www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/

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Ireland's dance theatre vanguards, CoisCéim [kush-came] are back with David Bolger's latest hit, Dancehall Blues as part of Culture Ireland’s Edinburgh Showcase. Nominated for Best Production and Best Design, the show captivated audiences and critics when it premiered to sold-out houses at Dublin Fringe 2024. This 'expertly ingenious' (Irish Times) duet unfolds in a surreal dancehall at dusk, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. Two performers dance with fearless abandon, their powerful movements cutting through chaos to ignite hope in a world where dreams and nightmares collide. Bold, gripping, unmissable.
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