The main impression one is left with as the curtain closes on Nobodaddy is that was a lot. It’s a show of over an hour and a half with no interval, in which fifteen dancers and musicians constantly move with enough detail that any one of them could be centre stage, and in which we get through, by my count, two dozen scenes that range from club dancing to early music to theatre to performance art and beyond. It’s some spectacle, but I’m still not sure exactly what it was.

Nobodaddy is the latest creation by choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan and his dance company Teaċ Daṁsa. It was premiered in Belfast the previous week (17–18 Septemer), and now has a run (25 September–5 October) in the Dublin Theatre Festival. As in Teaċ Daṁsa’s extraordinary 2019 production MÁM, Nobodaddy is remarkable for its intimate involvement of live music. In MÁM the musician was the concertina player Cormac Begley, with the classical ensemble stargaze playing a supporting role; here, the star is the US folk singer Sam Amidon, accompanied by a diverse group of superb musicians (Romain Bly, Flora Curzon, Jimmi Hueting, Mayah Kadish, Alice Purton and Jelle Roozenburg). Also as in MÁM, Keegan-Dolan shares creator’s credit for Nobodaddy with the whole company, a reflection of its collaborative creation over eight weeks of improvisation and workshopping in Teaċ Daṁsa’s home on the Dingle Peninsula.

Surreal tableau
As you get yourself seated in Belvedere College’s O’Reilly Theatre, you are immediately unsettled by the uncanny looping of the tannoy’s boilerplate about phones and emergency exits, while a figure wrapped up in angel wings (who later turns out to be Rachel Poirier), on what seems to be a hospital bed backed by a wall of computer cooling fans, forms a surreal tableau; meanwhile the other performers, seated in grey-blue suits and multicoloured balaclavas, line the wings of the stage.

Rachel Poirier (Photo: Emilija Jefremova)

The first movement is with Ryan O’Neill and Will Thompson: they slowly make the rounds, unsettling you again as they repeatedly spit on the ground and wipe it up with porters’ blue roll. Poirier is thrown out of her bed and lies motionless on the floor; Jimmy Southward runs in and asks O’Neill and Thompson to help. Straightforwardly asks – there’s been no dancing yet. And there’ll be none for a while, as O’Neill refuses Southward’s request with a circuitous story about bad backs and predatory health insurance delivered in a Beckettian bitter deadpan.

Southward, frustrated, starts a fight with O’Neill and Thompson, or rather the apathy and callousness of what they represent (bureaucratisation of care? capitalism?), and is dragged away. The scene changes, Poirier changing costume into a red showband suit and shouting out Dana’s 1970 Eurovision entry ‘All Kinds of Everything’, supported by Bly’s oompah-band French horn.

I’m not going to recount the entire show, but hopefully the above indicates the density of Nobodaddy: I’ve only covered the first five minutes or so.

Freneticism
What I would ideally do next is talk more abstractly about the overall arc of the show, but I am not sure there is much of one; or to say something about the impressions and feelings it left me with, but I am not even sure there are many of those. Or rather, I am left with plenty but they have no particular order. Amidon was fantastic, naturally, as a placid centre to the freneticism surrounding him. O’Neill and Thompson’s spitting in the opening scene was answered by other fluids later on when Poirier poured some full-fat milk on to the heads of the two men on whose backs she was standing, and then again when Amit Noy stripped down to his briefs and coated himself with an entire stick of Kerrygold – not the only time the show thoroughly blurred the boundaries between ‘dance’ and ‘performance art’. These gross-out moments were upsetting in a rich way, drawing out emotions about waste as cruelty, and famine and plenty. Bly and Hueting had a couple of sessions on a wandering pallet on which was installed two (!) drumkits, and they made great hay from that, variously supporting and duelling Amidon. There were moments of catharsis when all the musicians were playing – a huge sound of fiddles, banjos, drums, voices, brass, bass guitar and electronics –while the whole troupe of dancers filled the space with bold and jubilant movement; and there were moments of aching tenderness when the performers created a circle of quietness around Amidon’s intimate voice. The music stops twice, as if to signify moments of particular importance: once for Aki Iwamoto to recite, with the aid of a pair of bubble guns, Paul Durcan’s poem ‘In Memory: The Miami Showband – Massacred 31 July 1975’, and once for O’Neill to recite, several times while jumping off a ladder, part of a tract by the famine-era missionary Edward Nangle claiming that the blight was divine retribution.

Sam Amidon, Jovana Zelenovic, Holly Vallis, Jimmy Southward, Ryan O’Neill and Ino Riga (Photo: Emilija Jefremova)

Father of jealousy
It is not always hard to see how these diverse scenes contribute to something greater. ‘Nobodaddy’ is a divine character in the mythology of the iconoclastic poet William Blake. He is the ‘Father of jealousy’, who loves ‘hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering.’ This is reflected in many of the texts, which are often about (or illustrate) war or evil, in the costumes which echo (to my eye) US Civil War uniforms, and in the many references to famine (and to the Irish famines in particular). But other elements are harder to read as part of this concern. Iwamoto, Holly Vallis and Ino Riga had an EDM dance that was unconnected to anything else before or after; I was similarly nonplussed by the inclusion of Blake’s anti-clericalist ‘The Garden of Love’ and a virtuosic choral solfege exercise. And if, when I squint, I can connect Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘Eternal Day’ to the ostensible overarching structure of the show, I certainly don’t see how this connection was strengthened by the performers all lining up on seats along the front of the stage while Iwamoto went back and forth loudly firing a bubble gun with the brand name ‘BubbleZ’ plastered on the side of it.

Other ideas were more obviously relevant but half-baked. In one scene about love and rejection, a romantic overture was expressed through a tiresome wordplay on ‘I like you’ and ‘I like you like you.’ Elsewhere, yelled curses and animalistic screams too often substituted for considered expressions. Amidon was under-utilised, rarely doing more than singing songs from his records.

Nobodaddy is an exhilarating show full of individual virtuosity, symbolic richness, and big, open gestures. But after the adrenaline subsides, the lasting impression is that it needed a longer gestation. I speculate that the experimental collaborativeness of Teaċ Daṁsa’s creative process was pushed too far in this production: its twenty-odd authors have produced something that fizzed with creativity, but which was uneven and often felt like a variety show. A firmer directorial hand would have cut parts, conceptually and choreographically reworked and developed others, and made a coherent whole of the thing. That would have been the work the performers deserved.

Nobodaddy is currently running at Dublin Theatre Festival and will be performed in Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London from 27 to 30 November 2024. For further information and tickets, visit teacdamsa.com.

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