In eight weeks at their home base in south-west Kerry, Michael Keegan-Dolan and his company, Teaċ Daṁsa, created this keening yet often stirring new piece about death, betrayal and loss. Its title comes from William Blake – his name for a vengeful deity – and its music is collected, composed and performed by the American Sam Amidon. Yet its spirit is Keegan-Dolan’s own: wild, mournful, shot through with anger, confusion and occasional joy.
Nobodaddy opens with the body of a woman (Rachel Poirier) sprawled across two chairs, with what looks like angel wings attached. She is unceremoniously pitched to the floor by two security guards who have been alternately cleaning the floor and spitting on it. They sit on the chairs, discussing their bad backs and insurance claims as a distraught relative pleads for help. Then the woman stands, pulls on a red suit, and begins to dance.
It’s like a vignette from the theatre of the absurd on the futility of existence, and that same sense of incongruous elements butting against one another animates the subsequent action. Songs of sorrow mingle with fragments of Irish history; Blake’s Auguries of Innocence – “Some are Born to sweet delight/ Some are Born to Endless Night” – rubs shoulders with Dana’s All Kinds of Everything. Bubbles fill the air. A man flings himself from a ladder to a mattress while quoting Romans and praising the beautiful feet of those who bring good news.
Through it all the company weave dances of deceptively folksy complexity, jelly arms and loose shoulders contrasting with stamping feet and precise patterns. Under Adam Silverman’s starkly changing light, seven musicians and nine dancers meld into constantly shifting groups, making an entire world, at once hermetic and communicative, absolutely of itself.
