Michael Keegan Dolan has made some of the most provocative and inspiring work on the Irish stage in the last 10 years. But his next production is a ballet at, bizarrely, the English National Opera. So has Dolan abandoned the theatre? And has he abandoned Ireland?
Dolan is possibly the most significant innovator to have emerged in Irish theatre in the last decade or so. His company, Fabulous Beast, has produced some of the most striking shows in successive Dublin Theatre Festivals — and done so all from their Amish-like base on a farm in the midlands, near to Dolan’s home place in Co Westmeath.
Their work is “dance-theatre”, but the label is of use only to people who need to fill niches in festivals. Combining speech, live music, dance of all types, and ritual, Fabulous Beast have sought to interrogate on stage the historical roots and contemporary foibles of this quirky small country.
In Giselle, The Bull and James Son of James, Dolan created a trilogy as significant — or more so — for Irish theatre as Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy, or as any of the plays by the generation of playwrights who are his contemporaries: Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, Mark O’Rowe and Marina Carr.
And because Dolan is not of that lineage — seeing himself first and foremost as a choreographer, and working more or less remote from the Irish theatre establishment, on his own terms — he has been free to imagine on a grander scale, in more diverse media.
At a time when theatre companies are downsizing and cultivating works of smaller scale, Dolan has been daring in working with large casts on epic stories.
“In Ireland,” he says, “we don’t have a tradition of ‘big space’ theatre — the tradition comes from sitting around a fire listening to stories.” Dolan’s appetite for big-space theatre, therefore, has been invigorating.
But have we lost him? On Friday, Dolan’s staging of Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet, The Rite of Spring, opens at the English National Opera at the London Coliseum. It is the first ballet commissioned by the ENO, and marks something of a return by Dolan to his roots: he trained in classical ballet, and learned his craft as a choreographer in ballet and opera. For Dolan, this project is “much purer” than his other, recent work, “purer not meaning better, but meaning simpler”.
“I’ve realised in the last year that I love dance, dancing more than anything,” he says. “In The Rite of Spring there are no words, I’m working with a cast of 24 — 23 of whom are dancers — and we’re working with an orchestra who are playing music from a to z, and we’re dancing.” (The extra cast member is the actor Olwen Fouéré, with whom Dolan has worked often.)
That simplicity, for him, has been something of a revelation. In the theatre, he says, complexity has often become an end in itself. “To do simple movement really well, in rhythm, beautifully, is not easy. To avoid the pain of the truth that we cannot execute this thing well, we complicate it with layers of stuff: with complicated choreography, with dissonant music, or funny voices, or beautiful text.”
The Rite of Spring echoes some of the themes of The Bull, and gives Dolan further opportunity to explore our heritage.
“It is all about where the f*** we come from,” he says. For Stravinsky, it was in part an investigation of the Slavic, pre-Christian past of Russia.
Dolan has similarly found inspiration in pre-colonial Irish culture; Stravinsky’s interest in ritual also resonates with him.
“You feel, living in Ireland, that there always has been this connection with nature, with the landscape, the land. I think we have a real sense of ritual.”
For all that, the work is very Irish. This is precisely the kind of work for which Dolan needs international co-producers like ENO, and which precludes the possibility of touring widely in Ireland.
“What I’ve been doing for the last 10 years are these ambitious pieces of large-scale dance theatre which are difficult to maintain within the touring circuit in Ireland. If I toured The Bull, there’d be more people on stage than in the audience, some nights.
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. I live in Ireland and I’m passionate about where I’m from. How do I get more integrated into what’s here? I would have to fundamentally change the nature of my work.
“So I’ve been playing with ideas of making work that will fit much better into what’s here: smaller work, with maybe two dancers, that can tour to smaller venues.”
The Rite of Spring, he says, is an “anomaly” within that process. Nonetheless, it’s an anomaly that he hopes to bring here, next year.
That’s an exciting prospect. But the prospect of seeing Dolan apply his audacious imagination to creating intimate work for the touring circuit is even more so.