Photo: Jy Daly
FIDGET Feet is an aerial dance company newly rooted at Irish Aerial Centre Centre at Gillogue in Clare. Fidget Feet swung to a higher profile during City of Culture performances at the Milk Market, with Irish Chamber Orchestra and with other partners.
Set up by husband and wife team, dancer Chantel McCormick from Donegal and Jim Daly in production design, they open this year with a production of their own, ‘Catch Me’.
It’s for over12s and takes place at Lime Tree Theatre on February Thursday 4, 7pm for one night.
Essentially ‘Catch Me’ is a re-working of the Little Red Riding Hood myth, on vertical and cross-slung ropes between trees, on forest ground, in the air. Delving into the faery tale, this is a centuries’ old look at a teen on the threshold of adulthood. Red Riding Hood is graphic as well as allegorical and now becomes air-borne, with a tug on loyalties.
McCormick plays Red Riding Hood in ‘Catch Me’, Lee Clayden is Wolf. There is a third performer, an invisible puppeteer for their vinelike ropes, working as the opposite-end weight.
“It’s a sexual tale, this coming of age,” observes Chantel McCormack, “and we get the audience to build a relationship with the Wolf, who is always the baddie. We give our Red Riding Hood ‘chops’”.
She underlines the happy/ nasty tones to the myth, “as the Wolf’s hereditary stuff comes out and he goes to… take her. To kill her? To take her virginity?”
Expect a strong element of playfulness, enhanced by moving projections from Daly creating forest scenes as Wolf and girl affect each other in this knotted escapade. There is the pretext of Red Riding Hood heading to Grandmother’s cottage but woodcutters need not apply.
At www.limetreetheatre.ie
