SOME people find contemporary dance as an art form on stage difficult to watch or wonder just how to know if it's a good or bad production. What are the markers that help you decide?

Like all art forms the more you experience the more you see. My own interest started in the States as a Fulbright scholar, meeting another scholar who was specialising in architecture and whose wife was a choreographer. We ended up visiting lots of obscure contemporary dance productions around Manhattan. This led to us making costumes for her contemporary dance piece in Battery Park, lower Manhattan. That led on my return home to an invitation to design and then realise costumes for her new piece with the Ballet del Zaragoza, Spain. The experience left me with an appreciation of the art form and the complexities of what people working in the art form go through in order to produce something original.

It was with this eye in mind that I sat in my seat at the Mac to experience 'Gutter', the new dance piece by Eileen McClory. Major individual awards by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland are highly coveted, giving the awardee time and space to step out of their everyday practice and spend time on a longer project that will hopefully move their career up a notch or two.

In this instance, Eileen McClory's Off The Rails Dance idea to conceive something about the pace of change and information in media was challenging. We are treated to Kevin Coquelard, confused but ready to audition, being directed by an unseen voice, his movements across the stage repeating, from awkward movements to slick expressions, as if we were seeing the rehearsal and performance all within the first five minutes. The technology casually littered across the stage is assumed to be recording the dance. But as laughter emanates from the audience, we later find that we have been recorded and we become our own canned laughter projected on to a back screen – caught in a loop of entertainment and reaction, as many are.

Social media has turned many people into their own publicists – self-absorbed and distracted. This is commented on beautifully, with host Kevin Coquelard dancing on stage with a camera and tripod, as if they were a partner, pouting into the camera, giving it more attention than other humans. The movements are familiar at the same time; projected on a back screen, the audience experiences what the camera sees of the pouting dancer and this is formatted to look like it is streaming online and hundreds of people are commenting and liking it. An elegant comment on a contemporary issue. In other parts he becomes his own stage manager 

At one point lots of sexists clips spoken by TV interviewers are blasted out en masse, leaving us to reflect. In another, the dancer behind his desk tries to keep up with the speed of information flying around the globe and the 24-hour news cycle which has left the mundane – a dog on a sports pitch, for example – thought worthy of broadcast.

As the media becomes more porous and with our multi-channel universe offering more options, we are left contemplating the speed and contortions people can undertake in order to keep trying to get people's attention. The fact that this is done with dance is a credit to Eileen McClory and the team. It would be nice to see this production touring.

Belfast International Festival continues until November 5. 

Linen Biennale has finally come to an end with four artists in Portview Trade Centre level 2. There was a time when visiting something in this location wouldn't have occurred, but  the Boundary Taproom along with a market in the Banana Block – which happens on the last Sunday of the month – mean that Sundays have a alternative vibe. Robert Peters in the Biennale exhibition developed a series of  interactive banners depicting children who would have worked in the mills, surrounded by what he considers modern day mills: data centres. A QR code takes you to a link where you see the children depicted talking. This spooky interaction gives you time to consider the conditions that people were working in the mills at the time. Sometimes art can demand too much from a viewer in order to grasp some of its meaning, but in this case the audience seemed happy enough to play along.

A reminder that this Thursday  is Late Night Art and all galleries will be open late, so if you want to join the ever-increasing groups of people investigating our artistic visual art nightlife it's an opportunity to join us. If you're not sure where to go find one gallery and ask from there.