StageReviewBlack Box theatre, Galway
Michael Keegan-Dolan charts how he found his creative voice alongside longtime collaborator Rachel Poirier
A dancer drags a bag of compost on to the stage and hacks it open with intent. This is not quite a staged memoir from choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, more an excavation of his roots. As in his dance theatre works such as Giselle, The Bull, Swan Lake and MÁM, Keegan-Dolan here uses emblematic characters and scenes to evoke a period and a generation: while they may not be directly drawn from his own life, they tap into collective memory.
Recalling his childhood with snatches of song and the music that inspired him growing up in Dublin – from Talking Heads to Jacques Brel and Elgar – Keegan-Dolan appears alongside his partner and long time collaborator, the dazzling dancer Rachel Poirier. They take us back to the 1980s, to awkward schooldays, against the background of the hunger strikes and IRA bombings; to Keegan-Dolan’s experiences of violence at the hands of a priest and later of anti-Irish prejudice as a ballet student in London.
Poirier and Adam Silverman co-direct the performance on the stripped stage, with Silverman’s lighting and Sandra Ní Mhathúna’s sound design adding textures and atmosphere. In a series of comic interludes Keegan-Dolan and Poirier summon memories by pulling props – breeze blocks and a bicycle – from an enormous wooden crate, swapping costumes and roles.
Over the years the young Keegan-Dolan is exploring his identity – personal and national – as he tries to find his own way to express himself through dance. Breakthroughs come slowly, while studying with a renowned yoga master, and the discovery of a grand uncle, an actor with the Abbey theatre who had taken part in the 1916 Rising – unlocking in Keegan-Dolan a sense of his lineage as an Irish artist.
While the early scenes are in need of a firmer director’s grip, they build to a pivotal sequence in which Poirier lies inside the crate, as if buried in a coffin, before being released to dance a stunning solo to Ravel’s Bolero. Alternately urbane and primal, she spins, stretches and jumps, in loose circling movements, buoyant with a new sense of power and thrumming energy. For this gorgeous burst of creative freedom, the “72,000 lessons” were worthwhile preparation.
At Galway International arts festival until 22 July
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