Coming to Ireland I expected to see Irish dancing everywhere, traditional Irish garb as normal fashion, fiddles and clapping as the music of the country. The way America portrays it, it seems as though the Irish have never gotten out of their traditional, simple way of life.

I was seriously mistaken.

The Dublin Dance Festival, held at the Project Arts Center just up the road from Temple Bar, encompassed more than a traditional realm of dancing. As I waited for the show to start I felt curious and anxious to figure out what I was about to witness.

Egg Charade, an experimental dance performance, follows the characters Peggy and Peggy as they participate in a challenging exploration of issues in fertility and physical identities of females. Egg Charade had two parts. The first portion began outside, as the audience watched from a second story window in the art center. Two characters, as if setting up a mystery, used the street as their stage. I left the first part feeling a bit baffled and also felt a sense of comedic relief throughout the street portion of the show. The second portion of the show was in a small, cramped, intimate space where symbolism filled the room. Through the performance, I could see the portrayal of having to learn about yourself before having to take care of another living thing.

Structurally, the performance brought us through the stages of giving birth by acting out peculiar movements and awkward tension. The shock value of this performance left me puzzled inside and wondering if I was interpreting it in the right way. The beauty of this performance; though, was that I found myself picking apart the performance to mean so many different things especially as a young woman. The symbolism of exhaustion, fertility, sexuality, and stripping oneself of material things that don’t matter was so potent throughout this strong portrayal of feeling and emotion.

The symbolism in the show that stood out the most was the use of the pomegranate. Many were carried around in a bag for the duration of the performance and then were used to bowl with, eventually splattering around at the end of the show. To me, I felt it represented exhaustion of fertility in that the way the pomegranates were used throughout the show as well as sexuality as a woman in that pomegranates are supposedly aphrodisiacs. The element of the pomegranates gave connotation to many different interpretations.

The characters Peggy and Peggy eventually strip off their clothes, both literally and metaphorically and in doing so, make this performance hard to forget. As a woman in today’s society, I can say that this was a learning experience in that I walked in expecting the weirdest (and yeah, I got the weirdest), but the subject matter really spoke to me.

Egg Charade was different, edgy, ironic, entertaining, and uncomfortable. Let’s just say, I won’t be thinking of Irish Dancing the next time I come to Ireland.

Shannon Haugh

Pomegranate used in “Egg Charade”