How to be a Dancer in Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons is the kind of performance that comes about when the complexity of choreographer and director Michael Keegan-Dolan’s productions for Teaċ Daṁsa is reduced to an autobiography with a cast of two. The story-telling, the lyricism, the messy, prop-filled stage, the Irish passion and the passion for Ireland are all still there in full measure but the story-telling is essentially turned inwards to the story-teller himself. Not only is Keegan-Dolan talking about himself but he is on stage in the spotlight, directed by his long-time collaborators, co-performer Rachel Poirier and lighting designer Adam Silverman.
Keegan-Dolan has no difficulty with telling stories. He has a gift for it, and when the subject is his own life he has no shortage of tales to tell, beginning with a fable about an egg that ends with the admonition, ‘Don’t look back, don’t look back’. But this is exactly what Keegan-Dolan does for most of the next 80 minutes in episodes that start inside his mother’s womb and trace his development as a dancer and choreographer in what the freesheet describes as ‘a story of innocence and experience, sexuality and shame, humiliation and defiance, identity and nationality, endings and ancestry’. I’m not sure where the figure of seventy-two thousand came from, and the lessons he recalls are never easy, but together the title gives an idea of the depth and breadth of Keegan-Dolan’s brimming imagination that goes into creating his works and the lessons learned from a life lived fully in the theatre. The stage setting — a cross between a workshop and a gym conceived by Hyemi Shin — is an illustration of carefully designed anarchy from which his work takes shape.
But where is the space for the other member of this cast? If you were only to listen to the show, you would hear Keegan-Dolan’s stories that coherently link the beginning and the end. In between you would hear Poirier’s voice sometimes singing, sometimes barking, and sometimes reciting poetry; she doesn’t tell stories so much as illustrate and direct them. But if Keegan-Dolan is the contents of the show we see on the stage of Sadler’s Wells East, Poirier is the binding that holds it all together. Where Keegan-Dolan guides the audience with his verbal imagination, Poirier guides with her lyricism. She moves from theatrical realism — her muscular entrance in working clothes and safety goggles brandishing a metal cutter to open the theatre box of props — to lyrical improvisation in her heroic and intensely musical interpretation of Ravel’s Bolero.
But however effective their respective roles may be and how Keegan-Dolan and Poirier clearly complement each other as performers, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons is a series of anecdotes wrapped in sketches stitched together with two engaging artistic threads that are not woven tightly enough to hold the framework together. Keegan-Dolan is central to his own narrative while Poirier joins somewhere along the way. And even once she has arrived she still runs parallel to Keegan-Dolan’s flowing autobiographical episodes. Only when she dances the Bolero does the narrative come to a halt because there is nowhere for it to accompany her, and this creates an artificial hiatus in the production. Such is the direction and force of Keegan-Dolan’s monologue that when Poirier has finished dancing the Bolero it’s as if he asks : ’Where was I?’ before continuing his narrative. Tellingly, the applause is brief at the end of the solo; it should have been greeted with much greater enthusiasm because it’s a beautiful interpretation, but the narrative context of the show overshadows it. For me it’s where the integrity of the seventy-two thousand lessons is compromised. The show is engaging, it’s fun, it’s beautifully performed, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Michael Keegan-Dolan, Swan Lake / Loch na hEala, Sadler’s Wells, November 30
Zen Jefferson, Saku Koistinen, Mikel Murphy, and Erik Nevin (photo: Colm Hogan)
Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Swan Lake makes a journey through the reductive division in Christian culture between light and dark, and between God (good) and the devil (evil) to lay bare what he calls ‘the root of much suffering and confusion’. He sets his story around his home in County Longford in Ireland whose many lakes are home to flocks of migrating swans but his principal characters — the overbearing mother who wants her introspective son to marry, the woman he falls in love with and the magician who has cast a spell on her — have much in common with the plot of the ballet of the same name produced in Moscow in 1875 to Tchaikovsky’s famous score. It is as if Keegan-Dolan has taken the Russian myth and re-mythologized it in the image of Ireland, and because the lakes and swans are tangible and the narrative is taken from local news and national history, his Swan Lake is grounded in a conflictual social and political reality of a kind the romantic ballet of Imperial Russia could never have acknowledged.
There is in actor Mikel Murphy, whom Keegan-Dolan casts as The Holy Man, a distant relation to the wicked magician, Von Rothbart, though at the beginning of Swan Lake he is the one who is under a spell, stripped to his underwear and tethered by the neck to a concrete block, bleating like a goat. It is not hard to see the image of a plundered Ireland tethered to England’s oppressive rule. Then three ‘watchers’ (Saku Koistinen, Zen Jefferson and Erik Nevin) release him, wash him down, beat him dry with red towels and prepare him for interrogation. In Keegan-Dolan’s psychological landscape it is only those representing the dominant culture of oppression — be it political, religious or matriarchal — who speak; while tethered Murphy can only bleat but once freed and offered an informant’s seat at the oppressor’s table, he talks the talk — but not before he’s had a cup of tea and a few biscuits.
It’s an enigmatic but brilliantly staged beginning to what is in effect the re-telling and re-enactment of a story in which Murphy is the sole narrator because the other principal witnesses are the victims of his crimes: one drowned and the other shot. Under Adam Silverman’s lighting and with Hyemi Shin’s evocative costumes, Sabine Dargent’s set is a makeshift restaging of the events with trusses, curtains, ladders, plastic sheeting, theatre boxes and props for the benefit of the audience whose role is to listen and to pass judgement: morality with its oppressive mores and prejudices is on trial.
To make up for having to leave the condemned family home for a new build, the ailing Nancy O’Reilly (Dr. Elizabeth Cameron Dalman) gives her son Jimmy (Alexander Leonhartsberger) his father’s rifle as a birthday gift. It becomes for him an inert symbol of power in a life that has little promise as a result of depression, both mental and environmental. Finola (Rachel Poirier) is one of four sisters (with Anna Kaszuba, Carys Staton and Molly Walker) in the village along with three burly, bisexual watchers and a fine band of musicians (Aki, Mary Barnecutt and Danny Diamond) playing the music of Slow Moving Clouds. In his narrative, Murphy recalls the characters in relation to his various roles as parish priest, local politician and police chief revealing his determinant role in their lives and destiny. As the priest he admits to sexually abusing Finola and threatening her sisters if they were to reveal the truth; as a politician he takes advantage of Nancy and Jimmy for a photo opportunity and as police chief he pressures the depressed Jimmy into a fatal showdown. Within this narrative, but beyond Murphy’s control, Finola, the only village girl to express an interest in Jimmy, makes a fateful connection with him. Keegan-Dolan gets inside the psychology of his characters and expresses it in raw body imagery with overtones of traditional dance; at the beginning Jimmy doesn’t speak and barely moves, but when he senses love from and for Finola he unlocks his reticence and awkwardness with a freedom of gesture that is a first sign of healing. But that reductive division in Christian culture claws back any such redemption, shaming Finola into drowning herself in the lake which sends Jimmy back into deep depression with a rifle at his side. As police chief, Murphy forces a faceoff with him and has him shot by his officers (recalling the tragic shooting of John Carthy, a depressed Longford man who refused to be evicted from his home). Murphy has finished his worldly story but Swan Lake continues in an afterlife with clouds of feathers where the lovers are reunited and dance among their friends with the freedom of unconstrained, unfettered bodies in an environment without hypocrisy, connivance and political ill-will. It’s not so much the idea as the jubilant choreographic conviction that suggests there is hope.
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