Nostalgia is a longing for the past that emerges at a time of unprecedented and uncomfortable change. Nostalgia haunts modernisms as a continual reminder of the importance of reflecting on the past when pursuing the new, which is why Stan Smith has argued that ‘modernism is a retrospective artefact, a movement constituted backwards’. Accordingly, modernist nostalgia is an act of remembrance that denies forgetting, reconfiguring the past in the present to reflect on the pleasures and pains of modernity. Modernist nostalgia provides unique perspectives on the contemporaneity of the past when anticipating the future and, as Tammy Clewell points out, ‘nostalgia offers a crucial vantage point from which to assess the embeddedness of modernism in myriad political contestations of the period’. My concern in this chapter is to examine the role and function of modernist nostalgia in twenty-first-century Irish dance to demonstrate how modernism is embedded in contemporary cultural conditions in Ireland. Claire Warden points out that modernisms are ‘fruitfully disquieted by the embodied, ephemeral art of dance’ and to demonstrate this I will focus on MÁM, a contemporary Irish dance performance that premiered at the O’Reilly Theatre in Dublin, Ireland in September 2019. However, while my focus is on MÁM, my larger consideration in this chapter is to theorise the contemporary performance of modernist nostalgia in general, thereby considering the role and function of modernist nostalgia on an individual and collective level in contemporary Irish culture.

Tradition, Nostalgia and Mimesis: Teaċ Daṁsa's MÁM

MÁM was the result of eight weeks of improvisation in a community hall in the townland of Feothanach in the Corac Dhuibhne gaeltacht (district/districts in which the Irish language is the primary language) in west County Kerry, Ireland. Here, Michael Keegan-Dolan, in collaboration with his company Teaċ Daṁsa, traditional Irish musician Cormac Begley, and s t a r g a z e (a European orchestral collective of classical contemporary musicians), created MÁM, a non-narrative Irish dance performance that reflected on the role and function of nostalgia for traditional Irishness in contemporary Irish culture. Traditional Irish culture was deeply embedded and embodied in MÁM.