Dublin Dance Festival 2025: In Somnole, Boris Charmatz drifts like the mind before sleep. The result is compulsively unpredictable

Somnole
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Boris Charmatz
appears alone and exposed, bare-chested and barefooted, wearing a patterned pleated skirt, on a bare, darkened stage with no music. And for an hour he creates a soundtrack through whistling that accompanies a series of unconnected movement phrases that meander like the drifting mind before sleep. The result is uneven and unfocused but compulsive in its unpredictability.
Charmatz, who is the outgoing artistic director of
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
, in Germany, and a big figure in European dance, created Somnole during lockdown in 2020. He wanted to physicalise and make visible the workings of the mind. What has emerged is not dry and cerebral but a rattle-bag of ideas full of whimsy and humour.
He includes snippets of baroque pieces, love songs and film music that emerge, tail off or morph into another melody. Some are recognisable, others less so – Billie Eilish's Bad Guy might feature. Ennio Morricone's theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a whistling tour de force, elicits the most audience giggles.
Charmatz's movements are mostly contained and stationary. In the opening of the piece he slowly walks into the space, arms undulating upwards as if searching for something in the half-darkness. Later he stands with his back to the audience and slowly articulates the muscles in his back, in rippling patterns. Occasionally he breaks the slow rhythm, such as by frantically running in circles, in a green-blue wash of light, with the manic frustration of an insomniac.
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Breaking out of his solitary explorations, he tries to lead the audience in a version of Mozart's Voi Che Sapete, from The Marriage of Figaro, and has a slow, circling dance with an audience member.
Ultimately, the whistling is more than a novel accompaniment. At one point Charmatz suddenly whooshes and gasps, as if his windpipe were punctured. The effect is to highlight his breath as the physical survival mechanism for his movement.
Leaving the stage as he entered, he whistles Handel's Lascia ch'io Pianga, which mentions sighs of freedom. Just like the last breath before both body and mind finally submit to sleep.
Somnole is at
Project Arts Centre
, as part of
Dublin Dance Festival
, until Friday, May 16th

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