MÁM

CPH STAGE Copenhagen is a default stand-in for Denmark's yearly festival of theatre. With a partly-curated and partly-open program, the festival sees a month of performance, discussions, and events surrounding Danish and international stage art, with the part curated by Festival Director Morten Krogh happening mostly around the Royal Playhouse ("Skuespilhuset"), luxuriously-set against Copenhagen's lavish waterfront.

The 2026 festival opens with MÁM, a now-7-year old show from noted Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan. Or, more accurately, it began with the choreographer himself making an exuberant welcome announcement, and leading the standing audience in a couple of meditation-inspired breathing exercises. As well as grooming audience receptiveness to the show, the welcome address serves to introduce the audience to Keegan-Dolan's delightful ego, and he makes sure to point out that "there's a post-show discussion with The Artist... ME!" It's a curious beginning to a curious opening show, one that ticked the boxes in terms of slick international aesthetics, prestige, and crowd-pleasing spectacle, even if leaving little traces of groundedness. 

For MÁM is a strange devil. It's originally produced in 2019 by Teaċ Daṁsa with Dublin Theatre Festival; Sadler’s Wells London and New Zealand Festival, making its premiere in Dublin before gallivanting around on a global tour for the last few years, with the Berlin-based ensemble s t a r g a z e and lead accordionist Cormac Begley (who anchors the thing with a deadly barrage of accordion)  trailing along. They perform together with an ensemble of dancers, and a local child actor (in the CPH performance, Liva Eurasia Simonsen-Køllgaard Mochia) who moves with some trepidation through the various staged realities as the dancers and musicians whirl around her. But what exactly is the thing? How to decode the bizarre and fervent mysticism of light, sound, and movement that swirls around us, even as it swirls around our would-be-protagonist? Should we even be enacting such a sacrilegious gesture towards a work that, for all accounts, presents itself as an untouchable beam of memory, inspiration, and brilliance?

 

 Images - Ros Kavanagh

MÁM opens with the young girl dressed in white, a defined top-light pinning her from above. Behind, an animal-masked figure massages an accordion in and out wheezingly as the young girl unboxes a package and the house-lights slowly fade. A row of animal-masked, tuxedoed figures gradually appears behind her, a white backdrop and top lighting (Adam Silverman) offering a crisp, pagan-inspired silhouetted dreamscape that primes set designer Sabine Dargent's visual smorgasbord, offering a constant flip-flop of symmetry and asymmetry denoted in the playful variations of the dancers' costumes (Hyemi Shin), and mirrored in the choreography as they move through a series of unreliable formations (with one occasionally breaking the mould with a grunt or flourish, to the occasional shock of the others). Are they reaching out to our protagonist? Protecting her? Attempting and failing at their own internal systemic unity? Or simply creating a surreal, somewhat threatening realm for her to try and navigate?

At the conference "Working Lives in War-Time Ukraine Shifting Geographies, Vulnerabilities, Resistance"

In March I was invited to present a paper dedicated to the conditions of cultural workers from Ukraine, as part of a symposium in Berlin dedicated to working conditions generally through the full-scale invasion.

My final paper was entitled Precarious Acceleration: Cultural Work through the Full-Scale Invasion. As research, I interviewed several colleagues and heard their stories and challenges.

The final results showed a few familiar patterns: of dependency, of abuse and resistance against it, of depression and despair, and of co-operation and solidarity.

Thanks to the Centre Marc Bloc, KIU Competence Network of Viadrina University, and ZOIS in Berlin for the opportunity to be a part of things. The conference itself was full of information that painted a surprisingly normal picture of working trends in Ukraine, despite colleagues working in hugely adverse conditions and the threat from the East necessitating a lot of resource-allocation to defence.

Conference Website: https://cmb.hu-berlin.de/events/ukrainian-working-lives/

Full Program (pdf): https://cmb.hu-berlin.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Programm_Ukraine_2026_2seitigDweb-2.pdf

 The paper will be published in its entirety - more soon. 

 

 

"The Horror in Us" videos of lecture series, Dec 2024, Flutgraben Berlin

Over the past few weeks, I have presented a series of lectures specifically targeted to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These lectures tackle subjects that, from my perspective, relate directly to characteristics of the invasion - looking at how women have dealt previously with war, how things have unfolded socially in a post World War 2 context, and how violence and trauma function through the shared cathartic experience.

These lectures drew on key theorists of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s such as Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams, Michel Foucault, Carol Clover, and Giorgio Agamben. These theorists are key for understanding both screen spectatorship and the ideologies surrounding it.

Hollywood cinema - which is the field of reference for the lectures - is not the only source at which we might conceive of these events. But it does offer us some useful signposts for what is happening and what will happen - in the sense that the contingencies of spectatorship act as a mirror for the power dynamic of a broader society. Given the current reliance on the screen as a communication tool through social media, Hollywood history is also a useful portal to other times and places, where we might reflect on our own times using a shared language of filmmaking. 

The examples I chose over the lecture series are each drawn from post-war contexts that had large effects on the cinema coming out of Hollywood: Slasher films (Vietnam War and specifically the involvement of the US), Weepies (World War 2), and Superhuman cinema (US Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan). These invite reflection on the contemporary context, and especially, how the politics of the viewing experience influenced by militarisation affect phenomena like contemporary trends in pornography or online misogyny.

The full lectures are available underneath, together with their corresponding short promo clips. Each lecture lasts approximately 60 minutes, together with a 30-minute Q+A with the live audience.

During the lectures, I was proud to work together with my colleagues from Cultural Workers Studio, who supported me through the process as well as offering me useful feedback, particuarly my colleagues Hanna Liashenko and Anita Kopylenko. As well, I would like to thank Public in Private for offering us their beautiful hidden performance studio in Flutgraben - the perfect location for such clandestine activities.

Week 1/3: "Re-Watching the Final Girl"

Week 2/3: "'Weepies', trauma, & porn"

Week 3/3: "Re-historising Online Misogyny: Superhuman Responses"

Looking forward to developing more of these lectures in 2025!

You can keep in touch with these video presentations on the YouTube channel or over at the public instagram page.

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Series of Livestreamed Lectures: "The Horror in Us", Launch of Instagram Page

My experience of the social media platform Instagram over the last 2.5 years has not been filled with unequivocal joy. I understand that I should get with the times a little bit - "no-one reads long-form criticism anymore" "people communcate mostly with images and experience now", and so on, but I admit I was resistant for a long time. To me, there's nothing like - and will never be anything like - sitting down to read a piece of long-form criticism from someone who really cares about the subject enough to give it their full attention and reflection. Also, there's something self-aggrandising about the platform (and social media genreally) that doesn't fit with the intention of criticism: part of the act of criticism is staying invisible and putting the focus on the artist and their work, which doesn't sit well in the age of personal hyper-branding.

So in launching an Instagram page this week, my intentions are very much to fit my own sqaure peg into that round hole, without, I guess, over-reacting to the age of the influencer. My plan with it is to offer that most difficult of things, "access", as people have very legitimate reasons why they might sideline their critical reading: time and money pressures, lack of attention due to other demands, and simple discomfort at sitting down for an hour with ideas they fear they will not understand. I hope to be able to offer more byte-sized parts of discourse for those without the luxury to spend hours reading and dissecting a text (although in my opinion, it's time well-spent).

 

In conceiving this trio of lectures, I have been greatly influenced by my colleagues at Cultural Workers Studio - both their support, which motivates me - and the specific nature of their plight. While the 2022 Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine gets a lot of press, it can be a little lacking in other types of attention. There have been a few dedicated events and support for an exchange of ideas around those events in 2022, but I observe a lack of reflection on a cultural level on what I view as a seismic shift in philosophy represented by the last few years. Far from being given adequate attention, these matters seem to have been put into a category where they are viewed as uncomfortable or too difficult.