Ériu Dance Company: The Village

The performance takes place on a hill overlooking the settlement, years after each of them has left it. From the top of this hill, they survey their hometown and tell their stories, motivated by two central elements: a series of explosive and hypnotic dance routines set to a mix of traditional, contemporary and electronic music, and haunting confessional monologues.

Through these means, the audience is confronted with a dissolving sense of reality that surrounds both the narrators and the village.

Music by Paddy Mulcahy

Presented by Gyula Glaser

The Village is a meditation on Irish culture in general. Within this culture, villages are places that host both literal and metaphorical forms of drama in national life. For at least a century, villages have been a site for seemingly immutable artistic expressions of national identity, such as the centrality of fields to Cathleen Ní Houlihan and the Bull McCabe.

Recently, however, national conversations about villages have focused on decline; places left behind by a modernising, urbanising and diversifying Ireland. As a result, villages - even more than towns - occupy an in-between space in Irish culture that is both immutable and soluble depending on the viewer's perspective. This quality makes them fertile ground for the representation of stories of the loss and recovery of identity, which is the driving theme of both The Village and Ériu as an ensemble.

ÉRIU DANCE COMPANY was founded in 2010 as an avant-garde dance company to explore and express a particular and peculiar moment in Irish culture and society. Since the early 1990s, Ireland has been characterised by the dissolution of a supreme form of identity: an identity that was invariably white, middle-class, Catholic and heterosexual. Through seismic economic, cultural, demographic and constitutional changes, Irish people have since experienced a multitude of dissolutions and re-formations of the ‘self’.

In various works – Noċtú, Rite of Spring, Lïnger, Aon, Salómae, Chased, Walls Talk, The House of Bernardó Alba and Countless Cathleens – Ériu has expressed these currents through dance and now wishes to do so again with a bold new production: The Village.

In his capacity as artistic director and choreographer of the Ériu dance company, Breandán de Gallaí explores the poetic potential of the Irish dance form, presenting works that are exploratory and innovative in a contemporary context.

The Village premiered at the Black Box Theatre in May 2022 and was shown at the Earagail Arts Festival in July of the same year. His interpretation of Lorca's The House of Bernardó Alba, which looks at the play's themes through a queer lens and features male actors playing key female roles, premiered at the Galway Theatre Festival in May 2023.

Part of Zeitgeist Ireland 24, an initiative of Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Germany.