For two days only, a travelling fusion of art installation and dance experience came to NewportÔÇÖs Riverfront Theatre on Friday 7^th November-Saturday 8^th November.

The Dance Dome is an igloo-shaped portal 360┬░cinema, showcasing three very different contemporary dance performances, which incorporate not only unique and electrifying interpretive dance, but also pay homage to pole sport, parkour free-running and elements of break-dance. Each of the three short performances, The Beautiful, The Sublime, and Pal OÔÇÖ Me Heart, are projected onto the ceiling of the dome, and with audience attendance at a maximum of twenty per viewing and with reclined seating, the experience gives a personal, almost surreal feeling of being inside someoneÔÇÖs head.

The Beautiful, performed alone by Laura Moy, a professional dancer specialising in Chinese pole and counterweighted pole, captures the incredible woodland landscapes of South Wales, with Laura exhibiting her talents climbing a vertical standing pole, with a dance twist. The dreamlike, hypnotic sound of earthy background music combined with the skilful landscape time lapses affect the senses in a euphoric, numbing way. Beginning and ending with Laura in a mediating cross-legged pose, audiences feel as if they have took a journey through LauraÔÇÖs mind and thoughts.

The Sublime explodes into the dome after the therapeutic audio of The Beautiful. With bass, drums and a techno vibe, the music carries the four and a half minute film as it follows the fast pace of two male dancers, from leaving their houses to entering an abandoned building, portraying the urban decay of some of WalesÔÇÖ far out, graffitied buildings. Especially poignant is the panning scene of one of the dancers coming down his stairs, through his hallway and out of his front door. This makes the viewer feel like an intruder, watching someone (perhaps as a small child) going about their everyday life. The shape and spectrum of the dome causes most scenes to become not only enlarged, but also disproportioned. Each of the male dancers present skills of floor-based break dancing, and the relatively new and emerging sport of free-running, bringing it back to subtle hints of interpretive dance. Audiences living in Cardiff will also see flashes of familiar landscape, with Cardiff castle caught in a time lapse halfway through.

Pal OÔÇÖ Me Heart, as the title faintly suggests, is based in Ireland, on two young boys whose close friendship develops into love, at the time of political trouble in 1916. The use of the surrounding land in the routines of the two boys closely merges it to the storyline, especially in the defining scene where, as the boys go swimming in the sea, one begins to drown. Based on a critically-acclaimed stage production by Cardiff-based company Earthfall, the daring and divergent film replicates the hard times Ireland encountered, and also studies the importance of friendship and loyalty. Interwoven with numerous lifts, jumps and punchy choreography, Pal OÔÇÖ Me Heart leans away from the other two more abstract performances to project a theatre performance into the twenty-first century, with the use of digital technology and cinema.