by Leigh Witchel
Michael Keegan-Dolan has a talent for the redo. He directed Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre from 1997 to 2015; from his “Giselle” in 2003, through “Rite of Spring” and “Petrushka,” he’s taken stories from classical ballet and the Ballets Russes and made his own thoughtful versions. In 2016 he began a company with a deeper connection to Irish culture, Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance), and now with “Swan Lake/Loch na hEala,” he’s given the tale a moving Irish twist. The intersections aren’t in the steps, but the themes.
You will see swans in “Swan Lake,” but dump all expectations of princes or Tchaikovsky. Or of seeing a ballet: this was closer to theater with a dance base. Mikel Murfi, an actor in a role enigmatically called “The Holy Man,” held the show together in a tour de force performance in which he was sometimes the narrator, sometimes part of the action.
He started at the beginning tied by a rope to a cinderblock at the center of the stage, wearing nothing but sagging underpants. Moving his head nervously, he bleated like a goat. The musicians sat behind on metal risers, playing a few stringed instruments. As they tuned up, the cast filtered in at the back; an old woman sat in a wheelchair. Around the stage, on top of ladders, lay human-sized wings as if Daedalus had left a pair for later.
The dancing, both solo and group work, was simple, rolling vocabulary. It wasn’t distinctive but it got the job done. This wasn’t a “Swan Lake” to look at for the dancing; it was a story with dance interludes.
A trio of men looking like Hasidim in long brimmed hats, dark suits and white shirts, surrounded Murfi, about to perform an incantation. They grabbed and held him down as if for slaughter, but instead poured water to bathe him, washing and drying him with their red towels. After dressing him in black, they sat him on the cinderblock, brought him a mic and a cigarette and he finally spoke:
“I won’t say another word until I get a cup of tea.” It was possibly the most Irish thing he could have said. The men brought him tea with milk and biscuits. “And another cigarette if you don’t mind.”
Murfi began to tell the story of the O’Reillys: Nancy and her boy Jimmy. Elizabeth Cameron Dalman and Alexander Leonhartsberger started to personify them. The O’Reillys lived in a 300-year-old house. One day, Nancy made the fateful decision to get a council house grant to build a modern house cheek by jowl with the old one, on the condition that the moment the new house went up, the old one would be demolished.
Jimmy, who was proud of living in the house he was born in, bottled up his concern but spiraled into depression. Murfi told of Jimmy’s sadness, medication and ostracism. Four women in white ascended ladders and took the wings, as the problems of the O’Reillys inched towards the mythological. Nancy gave Jimmy a birthday present. The present wasn’t a crossbow, but his father’s hunting rifle. It wasn’t his 21st birthday, but his 36th, making light of the stereotype of the Irish leaving home late. And she asked him, “Isn’t it time you found a woman?”
Sure enough, Nancy decided to throw a party for Jimmy’s birthday. The kingdoms she invited women from extended only ten miles, but she managed to find three potential brides: all played by the men and all wildly unsuitable. Welcome to “Swan Lake” meets “The Glass Menagerie,” with gentlewomen callers out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Jimmy took to sleeping with the shotgun.
There was a lake, and it was indeed called Swan Lake, depicted by a large black plastic tarp. Instead of going there to hunt, Jimmy went to turn the gun on himself. At that moment one of the women brushed him with a swan wing. She dropped it and they stared at one another in shock, tentatively meeting.
The two leaned and supported one another, then they started to dance in unison as everything amplified. All four swans danced; Jimmy took a pair of wings and spun like a dervish before he danced for them, shyly, awkwardly. Not a step from Act 2 of the traditional ballet got quoted, but Keegan-Dolan gave us a dance with the exact same intent: a wary meeting of soulmates.
Murfi took up the narration again, but assuming another character: a young man whose ardent love for a young women, Finola (Rachel Poirier), slid with almost no perceptible change into sexual assault. Murfi navigated this section brilliantly, never stepping outside his character’s belief that everything happened because he loved Finola so much. He screamed at her desperately, “I NEED YOU TO FORGIVE ME.” And stuffed her in rage into a cardboard box.
He was only stopped by seeing Finola’s three sisters in the doorway staring. He cursed them: “If you speak one word of this you will be turned into filthy animals until the end of time!” And Odette’s transformation was retold.
The viewpoint shifted. Murfi became a local political boss, Mickey McLaughlin, who tried to coax Jimmy into a photo opportunity and got spooked by what appeared to him to be a lunatic with a shotgun. He played both the politician and his flunky who he sent to disarm Jimmy, even though the flunky argued that no threat was made.
The party rolled around; a thrift-store version of the one at court. The three men played Lyudmilla, Winnie and Margaret, and attacked cookies and beer like animals. The best tanztheater moment in the whole thing happened during a painfully off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” Winnie (Zen Jefferson) came at Jimmy with a garish pink cake as if it were a live grenade. She brought it closer and closer, almost shoving it in Jimmy’s face before finally blowing out the candles herself.
Like the princesses in Act 3, each of the potential fiancées did a dance. Lyudmilla (Saku Koisteinen) stuffed her dress into her tighty whities and ground her crotch. Winnie was also savage and gross. Margaret (Erik Nevin) was violent.
The black swans emerged out of the cardboard box, and Murfi, dressed now as a priest, kissed Nancy and sang, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Here, the swan in black was not an impostor. It was still Finola, only in a kindred mourning to Jimmy, wild and wounded. Jimmy touched her and she fled into the box.
Jimmy climbed to the top of his cinderblocks, and McLaughlin’s flunky arrived, with a bullhorn and the three men, now playing police. Jimmy knocked down the cinderblocks with a thud and the men fled in terror, convinced he was insane and dangerous.
Jimmy headed back to the lake, and we were at Act 4 of the ballet. Finola was there, but resistant. He touched and reassured her. He removed her wings, and tossed them aside. They hugged and danced a slow yearning duet, before she hid under the tarp in fear. He broke down crying, and the other swans, taking pity, revealed her.
Sadly, inevitably, the tale ended in tragedy. But in a dizzying transformation, the production careened from death into a vision of the afterlife as pure and wrenching as that in the ballet.
One of the best things about Keegan-Dolan’s “Swan Lake” was it had no interest in being like the Petipa/Ivanov version. It didn’t use the score, it didn’t reference the steps. Keegan-Dolan’s “Swan Lake” is meant to be thought of alongside of the traditional version, when you’re thinking about what happens and what it’s really about: sadness, the struggle for identity, love, destiny. The respect Keegan-Dolan gives to the core of “Swan Lake” while going his own way was why it succeeded.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Swan Lake/Loch na hEala” – Teaċ Daṁsa
BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, NY
October 15, 2019
Cover: Alexander Leonhartsberger and Rachel Poirier in “Swan Lake/Loch na hEala.” Photo © Stephanie Berger.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here.
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
