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A Swan Lake For Our Times Roused the Audience to its Feet at BAM Harvey
Michael Keegan-Dolan, the founder of Teac Damsa (House of Dance), a ground-breaking and impressive dance company, presented a brilliant multi-disciplinary allegory of unmatched quality and content at the BAM Harvey Theater this weekend. The unfoldment of the story reminded me of the parable of Pandora’s Box — with its desperate themes being stretched by an elastic band snapping all that we need to know into awakening. The story touched upon insanity, sexual abuse, trauma, and violence. It also awakened us to the human ability to hope and emerge from transgression, to redeem ourselves, forgive and to heal ourselves from suffering. Swan Lake is loosely based on the story by Tchaikovsky. Its similarities hold fast to broken love but go much further into depression and despair, sometimes into madness. It speaks to the broken bits inside us; when loss and pain are too much to bear, yet we come through the darkness and once again become part of the light as a consequence of the healing we seek. How we get there is not answered, the answering is somewhere in the wish to want to before all is lost.
With an excellent cast of performers, the story is set in the damp Irish Midlands where a young man struggles against depression as his sickly mother tries to set him up with women who from her vantage point, will solve his troubled…
