Love and destruction rub up against one another in Michael Keegan-Dolan’s latest production, as do elation and collapse, some well-orchestrated chaos and formal moments of great beauty, peppered with redemption and care. It is a remarkable ride. I have come to Teach Damhsa, literally Keegan-Dolan’s House of Dance, at the western tip of the Dingle peninsula, in Co Kerry, to watch the near culmination of eight weeks of improvisation, steps and suggestions, rehearsal and creation that will launch on to the stage at the Waterfront Hall, in Belfast, next week before moving to Dublin Theatre Festival and, then, to Sadler’s Wells, in London.
The dancers and musicians are still in their own varieties of sweat pants, jeans and T-shirts. Keegan-Dolan is rocking blue tracksuit bottoms with the Lidl logo running down each side. He manages to make them look like haute couture. A rack of costumes that include red showband suits, headwear and masks awaits in the next room. In the final production there will be added flowers, bubbles, butter and milk.
This is Nobodaddy, which takes its name from a series of works by the 18th-century artist, poet and occasional mystic William Blake, author of The Tyger, The Lamb, Jerusalem and Auguries of Innocence. Blake was a visionary who wanted to expose the lies behind society’s cruelties. He believed in hope, and had an imagination that could look at the seemingly self-evident and turn it on its head. In that, he might be an ideal muse for Keegan-Dolan, whose own artistic visions have given us a Giselle set in Co Roscommon (2003) and a Swan Lake/Loch na hEala (2016) peopled with, among others, an abusive priest, an iffy local councillor and a depressed antihero who has fallen for a bird.
Blake’s Nobodaddy was a destructive demigod, the lurking invisible father of jealousy, in love with war and slaughter, but Keegan-Dolan, with his subtitle, Tríd an bPoll gan Bun (Through the Bottomless Pit), is aiming for a more redemptive take. If you can come through something, it isn’t bottomless. It is as simple as that, probably. It is not the job of art to do anything for society, but sometimes, through the experience of a work, you can start to wonder at all that it might be able to do. The shifting feelings, passages of ideas and emotions that you can experience with an abstract work are what make a piece such as Nobodaddy vital, in all senses of the word.
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As I watch, my mood veers from introspection to joy and back. Outside, as a golden sunset lights up the jutting skyline, dancers swoop and dive, like the murmurs of birds outside, before coming together to form a haunting tableau in a large wooden crate. At the still centre of this is the American folk singer and musician Sam Amidon.
Watching Keegan-Dolan direct is a trip. Even seated, he is in constant motion. “I have got into trouble doing that in theatres,” he says with a self-deprecating grin. “I’ve had to give people tickets to come back, because I wrecked the show for them.”
Somehow we decided classical music was more important than folk music. But I can tell you pop music has changed more people’s lives
— Michael Keegan-Dolan
He moves with the dancers, every gesture replicated through his own body. In contrast, Amidon holds his energy, channelling it almost entirely through his voice and instruments, and while his body language is different as he switches from fiddle to banjo to guitar (he is in most motion with the fiddle, unsurprisingly), it is only later, as we talk offstage, that he becomes fully animated, gesturing with his arms and hands, open, friendly and hugely engaging.
Amidon’s arrangements, and rearrangements of folk songs, and poems are the heart of the soundscape of Nobodaddy. The pair had begun to collaborate on a shorter piece for Sadler’s Wells when Covid closed things down. Amidon’s connection with Ireland came via his childhood friend Thomas Bartlett, aka Doveman, pianist with The Gloaming. He describes folk’s blending and merging of cultures, alongside the carrying of stories and histories through time, and I am reminded of something Keegan-Dolan said when we spoke in 2022, ahead of his last production, How to Be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons. Then, he recalled the “hierarchy in the musical world, where somehow we decided classical music was more important than folk music. You know: that classical music is serious, and pop music is not serious. But I can tell you pop music has changed more people’s lives.”
In that show, Keegan-Dolan danced on stage himself. He has always stuck to the belief that he isn’t especially good at it, although, since How to Be a Dancer, audiences would likely disagree. Instead he works with his wife, and long-time collaborator, the mesmerising Rachel Poirier, and a cast that includes dancers and musicians from around the world. Pat Collins’s film The Dance, from 2021, showed Keegan-Dolan’s process, as he worked, with the musician Cormac Begley, to bring Mám into being. Ideas emerge through movement, energies arrive, moments crystallise into keepers. His core process stays the same, though it shifts to suit the needs of each group.
“We’ll run on through Lily O, and then it’s tea and crisps,” he says encouragingly. At breaks in the movement, they sit on the floor in a circle, discussing what happened, giving clues to what might yet be made possible. As they talk, you realise he has noted their movements, right down to the fingertips. “When you packed that bag, it exploded a whole new world,” he says at one point. “Feel free to try it another way,” he says at another. Is he constantly surprised by what comes up? “Yes, and if you’re not, then you’re looking for ways to be surprised,” he says. “You’re fishing. Then sometimes you don’t want anything to happen; it’s purely about the intensity of the sound, or the beauty of the song.”
The weaving of folk songs brings an echo of Conor McPherson’s 2017 musical Girl from the North Country, which reimagined the songs of Bob Dylan, but here things are even richer and more abstract. So is it ultimately about hope or despair? “I couldn’t tell you. I think they’re similar anyway. Anyone who thinks there’s only hope is probably a little bit deluded, and anyone who thinks there is only despair is equally so.”
Where does Amidon sit on that spectrum? “I would have to say the same,” he says. “That’s the nature of these folk songs. There’s so much darkness in them, and yet so much beauty in them. And that’s true of everything we’re up to here as well.”
Keegan-Dolan describes the experience of listening intensively to Amidon’s eponymous 2020 album on his five-hour drives from Dingle to Dublin to see his mother, who died in 2021. “Some of these songs are so dark, so sad, and the way Sam presents them is the opposite kind of direction. That makes them very interesting. To sing a dark song darkly is easy. And it’s really easy to be just one way about many things – to say, ‘I f**king hate this thing,” or, “I f**king love it.’ But there’s something interesting about how it affects your brain when you do it the other way.”
I often wonder if we need a new, less pejorative word for “manipulative”. There are moments in the rehearsal when the whole room is smiling; we can’t help ourselves. And there are others of collectively caught breaths, but to manipulate implies a darker purpose, and that is clearly not the intention here. “We were talking about this today,” says Keegan-Dolan. “The object is to create a situation where your mind or your imagination or your attention is being moved, and in that movement, then there’s a potential for another kind of personal realisation to unfold. And it might be that I love my mother, or it might be that I actually hated my sister, or I wish that guy hadn’t done that to me in 1985 ... You can have these interesting realisations when you’re being moved.”
“It is easy to say something like: life is short, enjoy it as we’re all going to die,” says Amidon. “But how do you actually shake people up so that they feel that in that moment? The initial process is heavily improvisatory, and it’s like looking for these disjuncted points, where it’s, like, ‘Wait, what was that?’ That’s when you open up into these deep truths.” In today’s fractured world of increasingly jingoistic faux simplicities, this feels more important than ever.
Towards the end of the piece, Poirier incants words from William Blake. There is also a poem by Paul Durcan, and words from Edward Nangle, founder of the Achill Mission Colony, alongside many of the folk songs with which Amidon’s legion of fans will be familiar. Keegan-Dolan’s own career has been similarly stellar; the pair tease one another about the lack of egos in the room, which is surprising, given the intensity of their personalities. Perhaps it is because they have both had the extraordinarily good fortune to be able to find a way to channel their energies in a way that gives them both outlet and a degree of comfort.
Later, as he shows me around Teach Damhsa’s newish home with evident delight – the company moved at the end of 2023 – Keegan-Dolan points out costumes from previous shows, right back to his Fabulous Beast days, and a couple of less-good reviews, tacked up in the toilets. “Resilience is something you need,” he says. “It’s harder when you’re younger. Some people just give up.” These days, he knows who he is, and that does make work, and life, all the sweeter.
Amidon is in the same boat but says this process has been almost overwhelming. “If anyone even emailed me, or texted me, I couldn’t write back. In these last eight weeks it has been impossible to even conceive of thinking about anything that isn’t part of this, anything beyond what we have been making in this beautiful laboratory here on the end of the earth – other than playing the odd tune at the pub.”
But then one of the team puts their head around the door to let him know that his wife, and fellow musician, Beth Orton, has arrived, in time for tomorrow’s mini dress rehearsal, and his whole face lights up. It’s time to go.
Teach Damhsa’s Nobodaddy premieres at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Tuesday, September 17th, and Wednesday, September 18, then runs at the O’Reilly Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Wednesday, September 25th, to Saturday, October 5th. It is a coproduction of An Droichead for Belfast 2024, Dublin Theatre Festival, the Abbey Theatre and Sadler’s Wells
Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Eight more highlights
The Agreement September 27th-October 13th, Gate Theatre Cast your mind back to 1998, and go behind the scenes as the key players try to hammer out a deal on Northern Ireland, under the eye of Senator George Mitchell. This Lyric-Gate coproduction is based on the real-life events.
0800 Cupid September 26th-October 5th Project Arts Centre, D2 Another musical extravaganza from Thisispopbaby. Emer Dineen’s new show sees her drag persona navigate love, loss and life in a postpandemic, pre-apocalyptic world. Despite this bleak outlook, expect an effusion of tender hope.
Darkmatter October 1st-2nd, Samuel Beckett Theatre, D2 Cherish Menzo and Camilo Mejía Cortés ask what might the world be like if there had been no colonisation. This challenging Belgian production explores the idea through movement coupled with bold lighting and haunting rap songs.
Home, Boys, Home October 1st-12th, Civic Theatre, Tallaght Completing Dermot Bolger’s trilogy that began with High Germany in 1990, Speckintime’s production sees Shane returning to a multicultural Ireland he barely recognises.
Breaking October 2nd-5th, Draíocht, Blanchardstown Amy Kidd’s first play is brought to the stage by Fishamble, exploring the boundaries between love and control, and asking how we judge when we can’t trust our own judgment any more.
Exit, Pursued by a Bear October 3rd-13th, Riam Whyte Recital Hall, D2 Pan Pan take William Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction and retell The Winter’s Tale from the perspective of the bear in question. Rewind and watch the scenes unfold, and see if the answers might lie beyond language itself.
The Jesus Trilogy October 9th-19th, Project Arts Centre, D2 Annabelle Comyn and Eoghan Quinn reunite to adapt the novels of the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee in an epic tale of displacement, memory, passion and dance. Presented by Hatch Theatre Company, Once Off Productions and Mermaid Arts Centre.
Trade & Mary Motorhead October 11th-13th, Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire The Irish composer Emma O’Halloran turns two of her uncle Mark O’Halloran’s plays into operas with Irish National Opera and the Pavilion. Trade takes place between a young rent boy and his older client in a north inner-city guesthouse. Mary Motorhead reflects on her life in prison and the events that led up to her incarceration.
