BWW Reviews: JOCKEY Spellbindingly Gives Shape to the Racing World

In 2012, WillFredd Theatre presented the rich and pastoral FARM: a promenade through a city warehouse sharing the experiences of rural communities through dramatic performance, live music, dance and livestock. Towards the end a pony was transformed into a show-horse, adorned in festive flights, while the dancer Emma O'Kane donned a showgirl's costume. Together, they looked like they were going to run off to join the circus. The reality wasn't far removed.

O'Kane may have recognized a link to her grandfather, a racing journalist and bloodstock agent from the 1940s-70s, while pirouetting through WillFredd's production, and saw a likely collaborator in director Sophie Motley, who lends beautiful vision to the presentation of found stories. Having spent the last 18 months learning to ride a racehorse, and engaging with the community of the sport, this new production explores the relationship between dancer, jockey and horse.

The three melt into one in an extraordinary opening scene, where O'Kane's magical choreography has her move from slender equine gestures on all-fours to the upright and curling position of a rider. The epic strings and galloping drums of Jack Cawley's music provides prettiness but also a sense of stakes being raised, heightened by Sarah Jane Shiels's arena-style lighting. There's a lot riding on the performance, as the dancer vigorously embodies the desperate punters on the side of the racetrack set, giving shape to their dashed prayers and disappointments.

It's most effective at its most personal. Press clippings written by O'Kane's grandfather are projected in Killian Waters's slick video design, and she matches the clicks of his typewriter with her own gentle taps, a confluence of their different languages. She even puts on his hat and dances the jazz moves of previous decades, as if trying to transport to his time.

What unfolds is a controversy surrounding a rogue racehorse, one that poses a blow to his career. Motley's playful staging takes a dark turn as skeletal images convey a sense of death, with O'Kane, in her turn as the injured animal, kicking and stamping the ground. Once defected, the creature is put down, and with it the hopes and dream attached. Something not as morbid but similarly devastating can be said of a dancer, for whom a brutal knock can mean the end of a career.

After hanging his hat back on its stand, and slowly dancing away from it in reverential movements, we become aware of the gorgeous tribute that's been paid. O'Kane spellbindingly shapes the excitement and wonder of the racing world, the world of her grandfather's, a world she can now possibly more call her own. After all, racing is in the blood.

Jockey tours to the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray on 28 May and the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge on 6 June. For more information and tickets see willfredd.com.

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