‘I keep making pieces that I think maybe no one outside of Ireland will like,” says Michael Keegan-Dolan. “And so far, I’ve been wrong.”
Indeed: his work comes from a particular place, but Keegan-Dolan’s company Teaċ Daṁsa plays successfully all over the world. The choreographer and director is speaking to me not far from where he was born, in north Dublin, where his new piece Nobodaddy has been playing to sold-out houses at the Dublin theatre festival. He asks if it mattered that I, a Londoner, hadn’t got all the Irish references in it. Well, my experience was certainly enriched by a local friend pointing out a characteristically Irish way of saying “yeah, yeah, yeah” on an inbreath (technically, it is the “pulmonic ingressive”), for example, or giving me some backstory to Irish showbands. In the end I say: what I don’t know I don’t know, the piece just needs to work enough without me needing to know. He laughs and nods (he laughs a lot, often at himself), and I reckon we’ve arrived at one answer why his work crosses borders: there’s Irishness in it, but it’s not an entry requirement.
Perhaps a better portal into his world is his sense that all art is, in a fundamental sense, “folk” art. There is a mix of musical styles in Nobodaddy – sacred and profane, pop, contemporary, classical, folk – but he cuts in to say: “it’s all folk though, isn’t it?” He means that it all comes from particular people, places and histories, something he insists on particularly when it comes to highbrow and classical art. When we first met last year, he said: “The Irish, we’re in this constant pushing and pulling with the British empire. That happens a lot with postcolonial cultures because the simple dynamics of victory expresses the idea that what they’re bringing is better: their language, their stories, their culture. The classical form is mixed in with this, that sense of: we are a great people, and we will make great buildings and great symphonies and have a great ballet company.”
Keegan-Dolan has form with classical ballet. A winger in the school rugby team, he fell for the art form at 17 and soon gained a place at London’s Central School of Ballet. “Postcolonial syndrome,” he says now. “I was trying to be a classicist, trying to believe that classical art was the fundamental truth and nature of all art.” Though he didn’t fit into the school (more than once he was expelled, then taken back), he recognises it as a formative moment: “I started making work.”
A student solo featuring two dead mackerel was an early sign that his path was leading towards more experimental dance theatre. In 1997 he founded Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, often digging into the dark, even brutal aspects of our lives, then in 2003 upped sticks from London to a field in Longford in the Irish midlands, where his ancestors were from. Several of his major works are set in the region, including root-and-branch reimaginings of the ballets Giselle and Swan Lake – the latter marking the company’s phoenix-like reincarnation as Teaċ Daṁsa in 2016, Keegan-Dolan having dramatically incinerated his Fabulous Beast memorabilia in a bonfire, left his home in Longford, and moved with his family to Kerry, in the far southwest.
Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, the first work made in Kerry and the last set in Longford, was a tale of the past weighing oppressively on the present that ended with visions of transcendence and release, and it’s hard not to find echoes in Keegan-Dolan’s own transfiguration: a new place for himself and his family, a new name in a new language for his company. “I have no bones in Kerry,” he says, “no ancestors buried there. I used to be so caught up with where I’m from. Not any more – and it feels fantastic.” Partly, he’s distancing himself from the kind of nativist ethnonationalism (“all bollocks!”) that surfaced for example in the Dublin riots of 2023, but there’s also something more personal: a reckoning with his own history, and finding a way of living that is informed but not haunted by the past.
A reckoning: last year, Keegan-Dolan made an autobiographical piece, How to Be a Dancer, in 72,000 Easy Lessons. There were many troubling moments, but he was also laughing at himself – affectionately, and frequently. Ways of living: the other two Teaċ Daṁsa works to date, Mám and Nobodaddy, are notably less knotted to narrative than previously, animated more by music: Mám was a partnership with Irish concertina virtuoso Cormac Begley, Nobodaddy with almost uncategorisable American folk musician Sam Amidon. Neither avoids the dark side but both are often also upbeat and convivial; Nobodaddy in particular is a remarkably profuse tumble of scenes and styles, stories and songs, framed by intimations of death yet alive with spirit and variety.
The work’s subtitle is “Tríd an bpoll gan bun” (“through the bottomless pit”). Keegan-Dolan laughs again. “Through, you know? Through! You don’t want to get stuck there.” Has Teaċ Daṁsa – which moved into its own premises earlier this year – helped him come unstuck? “Teaċ Daṁsa means house of dance,” he says. “That also connects to Irish identity, because so many had our homes taken from us. So building a place of your own, that means a lot.” In other words, he’s no longer looking for a place to live, he’s making one. And yes, there’s Irishness in it, but it’s not an entry requirement.
• Nobodaddy is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 27–30 November. Sadler’s Wells provided Sanjoy Roy’s trip to Dublin.
