It’s pronounced “ma:m” and it means “mountain pass” or possibly “duty” or, just possibly, “a handful of sweets” and it features 12 dancers from the Teaċ Daṁsa company, eight musicians, a small girl in a white communion frock and a powerful whiff of spiced woodsmoke.
Michael Keegan-Dolan’s previous works have taken (and run away with) established myths, legends, even ballets; but while the dancers and players of MÁM embody every human emotion during their dazzling 90-minute marathon, we are never spoon-fed anything as simple as a story.
Hyemi Shin has dressed the cast like the celebrants at a wake: prim black frocks for the women, misfit suits and ties for the men. Sabine Dargent’s simple-seeming set anchors the action in the everyday. A metal platform, a dozen chapel chairs and a bland wall of curtain suggest a school or village hall but even the drapes have their own drama, repeatedly slithering off the rail to reveal the next phase of action. The very blandness of the setting heightens the sense of a community in limbo, doomed to act out its frustrations, fantasies and rituals.
Centre stage sits West Kerry concertina virtuoso Cormac Begley, whose cupped hands dictate the moods and rhythms of the score. His four concertinas — bass, baritone, treble and piccolo — create a remarkable one-man band of sound from bagpipe groan to penny whistle. After the second curtain drop, he is joined on the platform by the equally splendid Berlin orchestral collective stargaze with a genre-busting blend of classical and folk played with a demonic energy that fuels the frenzy below.
Each sequence kicks off with an ecstatic solo (or set of solos), allowing individual dancers to explore their own groove before the group magically coalesces into a wild, devil-may-care unison: the instinctive synchronicity of men and women weaned on the same rhythms. The choreography, co-devised by the company, is wittily laced with social dance pastiche — headbanging, shoulder-shuffling, a whiff of the Pulp Fiction twist — and while the bulk of the movement is barefoot, the lace-ups are back on for the sly spurts of Irish step dancing. There is no dialogue but several almost Bauschian vignettes in which individual performers go rogue, as when James Southward lurches around the stage kissing (almost) everybody like a drunk in “You’re my best mate” mode.
Ellie Poirier-Dolan, the small girl at the heart of the action, watches impassively as the grown-ups seethe around her. She is part ordinary girl — she is mollified with crisps and orangeade like a child made to wait outside a pub — but her knowing stare and almost sacrificial garb hint at something far darker. As the long show approaches its mysterious climax, Keegan-Dolan’s little daughter finally gets her own solo spot, a spinning dance which is immediately taken up and amplified by the adults, eager for new moves. When they finally come to a stop, the last curtain falls and the tiny figure leads them in a wordless chant as a bank of wind machines flood the auditorium with a fragrant breeze.
★★★★★
To February 7, sadlerswells.com
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February 06, 2020 at 11:44PM
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Michael Keegan-Dolan’s MÁM — a dazzling dance marathon at Sadler’s Wells - Financial Times
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