Nobodaddy – an interview with Michael Keegan-Dolan

Nobodaddy – an interview with Michael Keegan-Dolan

Nobodaddy is a brand-new work by multi-award-winning choreographer and Sadler’s Wells Associate artist Michael Keegan-Dolan and his dance and theatre company Teaċ Daṁsa — a must-see for Blake lovers.
Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, talked to Michael about the production.

The night before I met Michael Keegan-Dolan, who has created the Blake-inspired performance Nobodaddy, at Sadler’s Wells from 27th to the 30th of November, I watched, with fascination, the film of the making of his previous production Mám. The gentle, nurturing manner with which Michael conjured incredible moves from his dancers, created a tsunami of the spirit, expressed through and with the human body. I asked Michael how he first encountered Blake.

“Many years ago, I read Four Plays for Dancers by W.B. Yeats, who had been greatly influenced by Blake, so I guess he was in the ether. My late brother, James, would have been interested in Blake and had kept some of Blake’s works among his collection of books. In 2001 I met John Evans, who had studied Blake with Jonathan Wordsworth at Oxford. John was teaching me yoga initially, and then Japanese swordsmanship. William Blake kept coming up — like a haunting — that sounds a bit negative! More like a blessing… 

Yeats and Blake both attract the attention of the academic world. I was trying to be in the world of experience rather than in the world of thought. When I was younger, I very much wanted to feel rather than think about things. That’s why I chose dance and then choreography, yoga, sword and gardening, as opposed to studying law or English Literature at Trinity College in Dublin. I ran away from that world. Sometimes we’re conditioned to think that thought, analysis, ideas should precede everything: thinking can take over and we can cease to have a complete experience. Blake is one of the most, maybe the most inspiring person I can think of, who gave us some tools to validate an approach that avoids that thinking matrix. But I’ve also encountered people who are very dismissive of Blake; I remember someone who said to me ‘He was that crazy man who died naked in a cave’! 

Every Night & every Morn

Some to Misery are Born

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight

Blake could see how many traps and nets there are with conventional religion. For me, he communicates how the spirit and the unconscious are fundamental to any creative experience or work. While we were working, I would have many of Blake’s books in the room and some of his prints pinned up on the walls. This was my way of gently introducing Blake and his work to my collaborators, many of whom were coming to Blake for the first time.

John Evans taught me an exercise where he would take one of Blake’s paintings, say his portrait of Urizen with his wrists bound to his ankles and work with the image over an extended period. You could for example, do your practice and then sit for a short while looking directly at the painting and then close your eyes, turn inwards and allow a feeling, an idea or inspiration come up into your consciousness. For me, I think it is important to consider how I walk into a room, how I greet someone, how I listen to the other person’s words, how I listen to the music as it starts to happen.  When music happens people naturally begin to dance. This approach doesn’t mean it all needs to be light and joyful: it can also get dark. I have learned that when people feel relaxed and secure, sometimes they offer things that are darker or hidden — things which can be  useful when you’re trying to make theatre, as theatre is fundamentally founded on the dynamics of what happens when opposing qualities are guided into contact. This way can feel more alchemical and less technical.

During the Covid years I spent time learning Blake’s Auguries of Innocence by heart, like a prayer. I had been raised as a Catholic and at one point was temporarily considering the priesthood, but I chose dancing instead and in making that choice I found exactly the right path for me to discover what I needed to discover, although that process is ongoing. I would recite the Auguries to myself every morning after I did my practice. I felt, like this, I could initiate a more authentic connection, which I could then conjure up in real time when working in a  creative space.

My partner, Rachel Poirier, incants a selection of the Auguries in our new show, Nobodaddy, which premiered in Belfast and then sold out in Dublin before we even opened. My immediate reaction was either that it was mind-blowing, kind of brain-changing, or ‘I had no idea what was going on or I didn’t understand’. That’s often what Blake is writing about: the importance of seeing through all those learned rules of engagement, that don’t allow you to look at something without immediately wanting to know what it means, how much it’s worth or whether it’s good for you — as opposed to simply experiencing what it is and allowing it to do whatever it might do in relation to you. I’m sure Blake had this same challenge much of  the time when he presented work; that many  people just didn’t get it initially. Some things take time.

We are working with brilliant music in Nobodaddy. We started with the American folk musician, Sam Amidon, who happens to be married to the English folk  musician, Beth Orton. Beth has recorded a beautiful sung version of Blake’s poem, The Poison Tree. Many of Sam’s songs come from the Appalachian spine, and many would have had their origins in Ireland, Scotland and England, some from a time when Blake would have been alive and working. I brought Sam together with three musicians who play strings and sing — Mayah Kadish, Flora Curzon and Alice Purton — and with a trio of multi-instrumentalists that play percussion, brass and electronics — Romain Bly, Jimmi Jo Hueting and Jelle Roozenburg. We created Blakean Contraries in the music, pairing opposing sounds and instruments in the score, so it was like a kind of Marriage of Heaven and Hell in a sense, and it worked. I always enjoy working with music because it’s immediately tangible in a way that many of the other energies that are interesting to me are not. Music is a wonderful support and inspiration.

Someone said to me ‘how did you pick the title?’ My answer was ‘I didn’t pick it, it picked me’. I found a few Nobodaddy poems in Blake’s notebook, that had belonged to his beloved dead brother, Robert. The word just wouldn’t go away. The reality that’s built around a Nobodaddy ideology is a state that I don’t want to be part of — and in a sense the performance was created in a spirit that was the opposite of that. As Blake wrote: ‘Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.’ ”

Just before our interview ended, I asked Michael about a moment in the film of his last work Mám, playing in Paris in December, where he talks to the dancers about a point in the creative process where a ‘visitation may occur’. Michael explained: 

“It doesn’t happen very often at all, unfortunately. The idea would be, that if you set up a situation, a space, with the right people, the right light, right music, the right theatre, like a ritual and not a rehearsal, that is something like a feeling, something unquantifiable would be willing to visit that space — a visitation. Everyone feels it. It’s an incredible sensation and it can happen in the theatre with 2000 people. It can happen in a room with just you and a picture of Blake hanging on the wall. It’s really inspiring when it happens — and you feel 20 years younger when it does happen.

But then you’re always half wanting it to happen again, but the trick is not to go looking for it, not to push for it. It will either happen or it doesn’t.”

Nobodaddy is happening at Sadler’s Wells from the 27th to the 30th of November.

https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/michael-keegan-dolan-teac-damsa-nobodaddy