Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Night Dances, created by choreographer Emma Martin, with music by Daniel Fox will be at Galway’s Black Box Theatre on Saturday, March 8, as part of a month-long national tour.

This production from Emma Martin and her company United Fall premiered at the 2021 Dublin Theatre Festival, when the Irish Times praised it as ‘a thrilling hour of relentless dancing and music’.

It consists of four dance vignettes created by one of Ireland’s most exciting choreographers in collaboration with dancers Robyn Byrne, Aoife McAtamney, Ryan O’Neill, Jessie Thomson and Jonas Krämer, who describe it “an expression of the invisible energetic connective tissue that joins us”.

After its success in Dublin, it went on to play the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe 2024 and Dublin Dance Festival and has now been revived for an extensive national tour.

Night Dances features a cast of ten intergenerational dancers and has a three-piece live band: Daniel Fox Jamie Hyland and Brian Dillon Designed by Katie Davenport with lighting design by Stephen Dodd, the piece is a love letter to dance in four parts.

The first, Lost Boy, is a solo for a male dancer, inspired by the biblical story of Lucifer’s decent to hell. In this piece, Lucifer is God’s lover thrown down from heaven, with God’s voice echoing ‘go to hell’. The echo is all he had left to sustain him.

The second, God is a Girl, features five bright-eyed young girls, blood pumping, dancing their hearts out, whipping their limbs and ponytails out into the world as though they are breathing their last breath. All fury, might, and faith, they are the future and they’re fearless.

The third is The Raver, which is inspired by James Joyce’s quote about Ireland: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. . . I shall try to fly by those nets’.

Pictured: The vignette God is a Girl features fearless young girls dancing their hearts out.