THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2025
The View From Mars
Production Photo: Carrie Davenport
Six Dance Collective's The View From Mars, choreographed & directed by Ruaidhrí Maguire, composed by Amelia Clarkson and visualised by Conan McIvor, is a fresh and brave challenge to the idea of outer space as the positivity of learning, exploration and discovery. It's a well-paced, powerful and provocative piece where the language of animation, dance, music and imagery are blended delicately for a means of storytelling which compels in its intricacy and unsettles in its reality – the reality of being cast away from one's home planet in the setting of a not-so-distant dystopian future, and, not knowing if there is life on Mars, trying to find if it is at all possible to have an experience of integratory, personal growth while metaphorically keeping the head above water. It's a stark insight into what you might call bare life, that is to say, a battle to survive without proper consideration about what or who exactly the survival may be for.
Accompanied by the sound of David McCann's cello, along with impressive visuals and instructive voiceovers, dancer Dominic Harrison portrays a traveller sent to Mars with clear orders to follow but unclear aspirations to pursue. In these surroundings, he is continuous and entirely natural in projecting the human dilemma of existing within or escaping from a defined "bubble". A bubble where one may be safely enclosed, with their needs apparently met in the cycle of defined routine, or a bubble of soulless repetition where the desire to find and do something new finds its way into one's mentality.
Production Photo: Carrie Davenport
Harrison's movements are full of stretching and reaching, a clever means of expressing the physical and mental struggles that his traveller has to contend with. Physical, in terms of the flexibility that must be maintained and exercised to meet any task that may arise, and mental, because if the traveller is unable to reach out to anything or anyone, his life truly will be entirely empty. It's all very ambiguous, and the tragedy of The View From Mars might be that this is one of the few things the traveller has to keep him going, along with the likely hope that he will find a way home.
But, even more commendably, Maguire, Clarkson, McIvor and company are able to echo the flip side of the popular enlightenment-in-isolation narrative. A narrative that's popular as well as truthful because of its value as an exercise in character development. Yet what if, as is the case here, one is stuck in a dark, scary and lonely world where they may have many stories to tell but no one to share them with, not even a volleyball? We see the traveller's experience, but does he see us? We hear cello music, but does he? This counteracts the theory of unexpectedly social enclosures, tales of individuals who may find a connection, with the pain of persistently anti-social enclosures, tales of individuals who are can't find a connection. It is, in a way, the inner space of Joe Dante's underrated Innerspace, with all the comedy and excitement hollowed out to leave the chilling elements standing alone. This is the idea of the soul as the commodity, an experiment, as some thing rather than some one, along with the possibility that all this is being done for fulfilment that the traveller will never find or even share. It's not a fantastic voyage for him, it's the exact opposite, and beneath the exemplary art lies enduring empathy towards his journey – this view, from Mars, will last as a successful translation of multiple art forms into a tale of someone boldly going where no one like them may ever want to go again.
Simon Fallaha
The View From Mars was recently staged in the Naughton Studio of Belfast's Lyric Theatre, from Thursday February 20 to Saturday February 22. For more information on the piece, click here.