James Joyce Quarterly

More than one hundred years after its first publication, Joyce's Ulysses continues to inspire creative artistic responses and tributes. The Irish choreographer Liz Roche was approached in 2021 by Solas Nua, an Irish contemporary arts organization, to create a piece in celebration of the centennial of Joyce's work; her seventy-minute dance production of "Yes and Yes" is the wonderful result. The show played Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia in September 2022 before its Irish premiere in Dublin in November.

Featuring many remarkable elements—including trance-inducing music, spectacular lighting effects, and the contortion-like muscular movements of four gifted dancers—the New York premiere of Yes and Yes graced the city's elegant westside Irish Arts Center for only three nights, 4-6 May 2023, but its radiance will be long remembered. The Friday evening performance was followed by an informative discussion with the choreographer and her troupe, ably moderated by the Joycean Alison Armstrong.

Though a product of Dublin, Roche had not read Ulysses prior to undertaking the commission, but her fresh response to the work, when combined with her intimate familiarity with the book's setting, led her to the creation of a sensitive, yet eye-opening, presentation. Traditionalists might take issue with the difficulty in consistently perceiving direct references in Yes and Yes to Joyce's novel, yet the performance was both physically impressive in its execution and thought-provoking in its approach. But that was the point.

To be clear, perhaps the greatest and most important aspect of Yes and Yes is its insistent commitment to not being a slavish interpretation of Joyce's work. So, rather than simply attempting to replicate the book's narrative in dance—or even to harken back to Homer's Odyssey—Roche instead uses her performers and their considerable talents to create the atmosphere of Joyce's Dublin, imagining, as she says, "through movement, what Ulysses might invoke even one hundred years from now, one hundred years into the future." Roche succeeds in imagining that, and more, for her audience. Futuristic, surrealistic, even psychedelic are very apt terms to describe Yes and Yes.

The show begins with the following words streaming silently in red on a continuous loop across a large rectangular monitor hung high above an otherwise bare stage:

Sound of fans and gulls, traffic and sea [End Page 254]

The sounds of the Dublin city and its seaside setting fade in and out during this performance, but mind-blowing, alternative-style music by Ray Harman—loud, profound, slowly advancing cascades of soundscapes—dominates the aural experience of Yes and Yes.

At the start, the four dancers in this piece appear one by one in colorful peasant shirts, baggy pants, and dresses, coupling up and moving first in unison, then in complement and sometimes in opposition to one another. Additional wording on the overhead monitor designates sections of the performance: "The Boys and the Milkwoman," "M'appari," and "Nostos." The dancers never speak, but they change costumes on stage during the course of the performance, stripping down to what look like flowered wet suits that cover from head to toe, including their faces; it is otherworldly for they look like aliens. At one point, the men slowly drag the women by their feet across the stage. Later, their dance movements seem to include every position that a human body and its parts can assume. Arms and hands shake independently, as if out of control; chests rise and fall almost preternaturally; prone bodies wriggle like worms. There is a lot of literal finger-pointing in this show; an extended finger swaying back and forth, like a metronome, is a repeated image.

The single break in this dance is filled by a short movie on the monitor entitled "Nausicaa." It is a two- or three-minute silent film but for some background music, featuring one of the male dancers gazing at a female dancer astride a cement wall covered in graffiti. The largest piece of graffito...