Dance

There’s real passion – to say nothing of real grass and real water – in ‘Flowerbed’. There are also real laughs and some real shocks. ‘Storytelling, that’s my instinct,’ says Michael Keegan-Dolan, the founding director of the Dublin-based Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre. ‘I want to connect with the audience. But when I started making pieces, it really wasn’t cool to do anything that was in any way clear or had a narrative; it was considered really naff. Everything had to be weird and incomprehensible. If it was clear, it was considered crap. For a long time I was afraid of being direct. I really do wonder why we’ve become frightened of clarity.’ Feature continues

Keegan-Dolan, now 37, left Ireland to study dance at the London Studio Centre when he was 18. ‘I was stiff as a board. In retrospect I’m not sure it was the right thing to do: how to destroy a person’s coordination and confidence in three easy lessons. Stress is not a good way to train anyone in anything.’

During his three years of ballet training, Keegan-Dolan began to realise that he was far more interested in creating than in performing. ‘I had better ideas than craft; a creativity that fell short because of my level of craftsmanship. Very good ideas in the hands of a young man, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.’

Without the funds to create his own work, he found himself earning his living by working as a movement director on a series of prestigious opera productions. It eventually proved traumatic: ‘In opera, the physical and intellectual get separated,’ he says, as he slices his hand across his vocal chords. ‘The director knows about this bit,’ he taps the side of his skull, ‘and doesn’t want to deal with anything below that: “I went to Oxford and studied for a long time and I know how to talk, how to think. You cope with the rest.” I was supposed to make singers look good, the directors couldn’t be bothered. Doing that for awhile really did my head in.

‘We’ve become schizophrenic. Not just artists, but normal people are pretty fucked-up physically. The level of physicality is pretty diminished in our society.’

By 1997, Keegan-Dolan was burned out and working as a courier. Then, unexpectedly, he got an invite from home to create a piece for the annual Dublin International Festival. Things have grown from there. But despite its many major successes, Fabulous Beast will never be a full-time company. ‘I don’t want to get bogged down with an office and a studio,’ he says, ‘I’m not a “career” man. I spend most of my time trying not to do things, so when I do do something it will actually be the right thing.’

‘Flowerbed’ is London’s second taste of Keegan-Dolan’s ‘right thing’. If you look closely, it’s actually ‘Romeo and Juliet’ squeezed into a contemporary suburban garden. ‘It’s a good story; two families, two young lovers and a lot of people get killed.’

Last season, Fabulous Beast’s irreverent update of ‘Giselle’ triumphed in the Barbican’s main theatre. ‘Flowerbed’ is now running in the Pit. ‘It’s very, very intimate. I haven’t worked in that size of space in a very long time. It’s quite an intense piece, so it will be exciting to see how it goes up close with smaller, more subtle and more detailed things.

‘On the other hand, I love the idea of big canvases. I could work with 100 people without the skip of a heartbeat.’