by Sanjoy Roy
“From where I’m sitting, looking west, there’s a mám right there,” says choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, pointing through the window. He’s at home in County Kerry, in the southwest corner of Ireland, but since my window is Zoom, from London, he has to explain what he’s talking about. “A mám is a pass through the mountains,” he says, his hand tracing a little undulation in the air. “It’s a geographical structure that encourages people to go a certain way. That’s really interesting because mám also means obligation. That’s how I felt about this piece MÁM. Sometimes as artists, you feel this obligation to do something, even if you can’t really say why.”
As an interviewer, I feel obliged to ask him why, anyway. His answers come in the form of stories, not explanations. He points through the window again and says, “Cormac [Begley], the concertina player, lives on the other side of the mám. His family have lived there since the 17th century, I think. This piece was about meeting Cormac, and about trying to meet this place, as best I could.”
‘This place’ is part of the Gaeltacht (regions where the primary spoken language is Irish), and while Begley’s family may have deep roots here, Keegan-Dolan arrived through a more circuitous route. He left Dublin in 1988 as a ‘mostly’; English-speaking 18-year-old. establishing his name internationally both with his company Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre and as a choreographer in opera and theatre. In 2004 he relocated to the Irish midlands, his ancestral home, before moving to West Kerry in 2016, his new company anointed not only with a new name, but another language. Teaċ Daṁsa’s first production transformed Swan Lake into Loch na hEala, a story of depression, church abuse and finally ecstatic transfiguration, set in small-town Ireland and featuring no Tchaikovsky and not a step of ballet.
Photos by Ros Kavanagh
Keegan-Dolan’s relationship with ballet is ‘complicated’. A winger in the school rugby team, he fell for ballet at 17, soon gaining a place at London’s Central School of Ballet. “It was square peg, round hole,” he says. “I got thrown out. I got taken back in. I got expelled, I got taken back again. But I started making work. There was this solo with two dead mackerel, and I remember dropping one and it kind of exploded, and all the ballet teachers were hiding behind their clipboards. So ballet school was a car crash, but there were great people there, and in retrospect I’m really thankful for it. The beauty of it was that I didn’t fit.”
He connects that to a bigger picture. “The Irish, we’re in this constant pushing and pulling with the British Empire. It happens a lot with postcolonial cultures because the simple dynamics of victory expresses the idea that what they’re bringing is better: their language, their stories, their culture. The classical form is mixed in with this, that sense of: we are a great people, and we will make great buildings and great symphonies and have a great ballet company.”
Photo by Ros Kavanagh
Keegan-Dolan stayed in London, working in bars and pubs. But “there was something in me, as my mother would say. I wanted to tell stories. That’s very much in my culture. At the same time dancing has no words, and I was suspicious of words. And I loved dance.” That heave and tug between storytelling and dance became formative of Keegan-Dolan’s work, which moves freely between dancing, music and theatre.
What about his subject matter? “Looking back, I think I was interested in the idea that things are not quite as they appear. Like those things within a family that no one talks about. Or those famous old Royal Ballet dancers from working-class backgrounds who ended up speaking with this very RP accent. Or the Catholic Church in Ireland, which in my lifetime has kind of fallen apart. All these questions around veils and manners and how things appear. I remember making this piece with everyone dressed up in ties and silks at a dinner party, and by the end they were all crawling around like animals, half naked.”
Photo by David Gray
Keegan-Dolan went on to found Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, and I’m aware that we’ve not yet spoken about the mythic first word of that name. “Maybe that’s also about what we can’t see,” he ventures, observing that he’s telling this story now, not as he lived it then (at the time, he found “fabulous” in a book about tarot). “The way you feel when you stand at the top of a mountain in the wind – that’s a spiritual feeling, you know? Maybe connection is a better word than spiritual – that moment when separation diminishes and you feel connected, in a big way. Perhaps that’s why I love theatre, because you’re creating moments of connection.” It makes sense that the work of William Blake, with its confluence of nature, society, myth, mysticism and transcendence, became a touchstone: “Blake was a brilliant romantic poet with an incredible mind, and he was saying all these things that I believed.”
Fabulous Beast is now no more – which brings us back to “this place”, to Cormac Begley and the mám. “Cormac is a formidable, highly sophisticated person, and he has dug really deep into his tradition and his music. I wanted go free-diving into his imagination. I suppose the fundamental thing I learned is this: for centuries, Irish culture was cooked under pressure. Our music became hidden, like our language became hidden and our stories were told in the dark. But that music can be as complex and moving and worthwhile as any piece of Beethoven or Bach.”
Photo by David Gray
He continues: “One thing I like about what I’ve been trying to do is that it’s Irish but not ‘Irish’, you know? Our company come from five different continents. And when people pull out the ‘Irish’ thing, it’s usually either isn’t Ireland great? or don’t those Irish like drinking and fighting and all those other stereotypes. This can get extremely dull very quickly. And it’s a trap.”
It strikes me that Keegan-Dolan’s sense of artistic obligation comes from trying to find some passage through the constant pushing and pulling of his own times and places. And perhaps that is terrain where dance, music, theatre and story can go, and explanations and ideas cannot. Time to stop asking why, then, and instead follow the steps, scenes and sounds of this work that he has called, simply, MÁM.
Sanjoy Roy writes on dance for The Guardian, and is editor of Springback Magazine, a writing project covering contemporary dance across Europe, and keeps a personal archive at sanjoyroy.net.
This article first appeared in the programme for MÁM at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in October 2023
Photo by Ros Kavanagh
