Tabernacle was a very strange experience for me; I want to say that a lot of it went over my head.

I am usually the first to criticise somebody for giving this kind of feedback following a contemporary dance performance - what does it mean?  I felt this piece got lost in representation, using dance as moving and changing symbols of something else. I like the complexities and subtelties and unknowabilities of watching a dancing body, the space this can give a viewer. I like not having to decipher something in terms of a cultural/political/social knowledge base - of course this happens automatically, filtering and analysing things in terms of past experiences but when I need to do this actively, to get anything from a work, I find it difficult.

I had read that this was a work about the changing attitudes towards religion in Ireland, I immediately think about sex. I think about guilt, shame,sinning and confessing, I think about homosexuality. What I saw in the work was a naked man dancing, his body covered in vibrant tattoos, I saw a man and a woman fake an empassioned kiss (he avoided her mouth and went for her neck), followed by an entwined duet sequence of contemporary dance bumping and grinding - was this representing some kind of sexual liberation, I wondered? I saw a woman bind her breasts, people climbing on boxes and carrying one another, catching one another if they would fall...

I suppose I am saying that I didn't connect with this piece, it felt old-fashioned, nostalgic almost. I didn't feel the dancers were in the same moment as I was but that they were off in another world that I wasn't privy to. There was a faux(?) sense of sobriety and sombreness that acted like a wall between me and the dancing. The movement was articulately delivered in that spacious way of bodies trained in somatic methods or techniques; sometimes verging on the stereotypical other times intricate partnering performed with ease and exactitude.

I loved the wooden floor, a warm and welcome change that drew the dance away from the standard 'vibe' of the Robin Howard Dance Theatre.

Athe end of this hour and twenty-five minute performance I appreciated the dancer's work, what they must have invested in the performance and because of this left conflicted.