It’s been 20 years since I stood in a windswept, desolate tract of land in the rugged Irish midlands watching choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan building a home for himself, near a space for his company, then known as Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, with his bare hands.
“Some people like looking at icebergs, some people like looking at lakes,” he told me then. “I like looking at the Irish midlands.”
The country’s contemporary dance scene at the time—and in which Keegan-Dolan had grown up—was as barren as that landscape. Though Riverdance had brought international fame to a turbo-charged, commercialized version of its folk dances, Ireland had no official national ballet, few choreographers of international stature, and just a handful of independent dance companies, toiling away in relative obscurity. And until 2002, for those with a desire to see international work on tour, there were no dedicated festivals and a dearth of modern venues large enough or sufficiently equipped.
Fast-forward 20 years and the situation couldn’t be more radically different. Irish contemporary dance is enjoying an unprecedented boom. Some of it has been powered by Keegan-Dolan himself, who has become an undisputed force in global dance. He routinely tours to flagship venues around the world and has picked up Olivier nominations for shows, including for a primordial 2003 Giselle, transplanted to the remote Irish town of Ballyfeeny, and The Bull, in 2005, featuring an uproarious spoof of Riverdance. His latest, Nobodaddy, seen at London’s Sadler’s Wells last autumn, combines themes from the poet William Blake, absurdist dramatic fragments worthy of Samuel Beckett, and emphatically eccentric movement. (At one point, a dancer smears his body in Irish Kerrygold butter.)
But Keegan-Dolan is no longer a lone crusader, and is joined by an upstart flurry of companies and choreographers. These include Oona Doherty, the Northern Irish artist whose raw, subversive works have put her on the international dance map over the course of the past decade. There’s also former ballet dancer, now multidisciplinary disruptor, Emma Martin. Her 2019 work Birdboy, a piece for young and adult audiences which she describes as “a tribute to all the weird kids left on the sidelines,” was revived in February this year on the new Sadler’s Wells East stage. “I think it’s really exciting in Ireland at the moment,” Martin says. “In the last three or four years, we’ve been getting more international engagements. For such a small country, we’re doing well.”
Kévin Coquelard in Emma Martin’s Birdboy. Photo by Luca Truffelli, Courtesy Martin.
Choreographer Catherine Young agrees. Young has just finished the Irish tour of her intertwined dance, documentary, live-music, and text reflection on life and freedom to move in the Palestinian West Bank, entitled Floating on a Dead Sea (2021). “The volume of people around working in dance didn’t exist 20 years ago,” she says. “Now you’re seeing a lot more diversity in the style of choreography and movement.”
Catherine Young’s Ciseach. Photo by Patricio Cassinoni, Courtesy Young.
One of the most significant developments has been the creation of a new national dance company, Luail (which means “movement” in the Irish language). Liz Roche—who has woven elegant danceworks from the poems of W. B. Yeats, and created a condensed movement version of James Joyce’s Ulysses—was appointed artistic director of Luail when it launched last year. She plans “to create an environment where we would have a full-time core ensemble of dancers,” she says, and to “create a home for that company”—a building of its own.
Though some dance artists have worried that Luail might absorb much of Ireland’s dance budget, so far Roche appears to have avoided potential pitfalls and made inspired choices. Some of Luail’s first commissions have gone to the latest sensation in Irish contemporary dance, Mufutau Yusuf, who is also one of the company’s two resident choreographers. Born in Lagos but brought up in the rural Irish enclave of County Meath—not so far, coincidentally, from Michael Keegan-Dolan’s former base in the midlands—Yusuf is arguably the first figure to emerge in the past two decades to seriously challenge Keegan-Dolan’s domination of the Irish contemporary scene.
Arthuric Direct LIZA Recher. Photo Dr Tru Whewfarelei, Donial Courtesy.
Yusuf’s latest work, Impasse, seen last November at Sadler’s Wells, includes an extraordinary scene where the bodies of the two performers seem to burst open in an explosion of tearing sinews, ripping viscera, splitting muscles. Astonishingly, for the first 40 minutes of an hour-long performance, the faces of both are largely concealed by shadow or locked away in silhouette. “I wanted to explore visibility,” Yusuf says. “What is visible and what is invisible. Visibility as power.” Equally remarkable is that, through the simple physical metaphor of running, it’s all solidly rooted in narratives of migration and displacement. “As much as it’s running from, we’re also running to. We’re running to a possible horizon,” Yusuf says. “Running back home, maybe. We’re running to a possible dream. We’re running towards a distant land, a distant home. It can be perceived in many different ways.”
Mufutau yhusuf in the studio size. Photo by Alisson Richa, Cursy Courty.
Yusuf will choreograph one installment of a trio of pieces—entitled Chora—for Luail’s inaugural season. I watched as he crafted this new, still nameless dance, sculpting it from the bodies of the new ensemble, steered only by Yusuf’s gentle, whispered, barely audible prompts.
This is a group of talented young dancers that reflects modern Ireland’s cultural landscape. Luail includes Irish, English, American, Taiwanese, and Ugandan artists, fluent in a range of dance styles. It is the epitome of a modern European company. And it’s living proof that Ireland is no longer a dance wasteland. Finally, there is no need for the country’s visionary dance talents to build their own studios, carve their own idylls, hewn out of the land, with their own bare hands—unless, that is, they really want to.
A Danignance Dancers. Photo by Patricio Cassinoni, Comil Courtesy.
Updating Traditional Irish Dance From Within
Until relatively recently, Ireland was known primarily for its folk dance—and for the glitzy derivative of the form displayed in Riverdance, which marks its 30th anniversary this year. Irish folk was traditionally so highly restrictive that its dancers sometimes stitched down the sleeves of their costumes to radically strip away expression above the waist.
“The whole technique of step dance is down in the feet,” says Colin Dunne, former lead dancer with Riverdance. “The more emotional parts of the body—your gut, your stomach, your heart, your lungs, your head, your brain, even the face—were just disconnected from the dance form.”
Colin Dunne in his Concert. Photo by Maurice Gunning, Courtesy Dunne.
In recent decades, a drive to modernize Irish folk dance from within—by seasoned artists seeking more freedom, and a younger generation pushing back against boundaries—has also had an impact on the overall landscape of Irish dance. Since quitting Riverdance, for example, Dunne has concentrated on creating more challenging works, such as 2008’s Out of Time, a show about the evolution of Irish dancing. One critic noted that “In some of his material, Dunne focuses purely on the steps, deconstructing them into basics or reconfiguring them into new possibilities.”
Breaking the habits and reflexes of a lifetime proved a challenge. “Irish dance is an obedient form,” he says. “It’s taught very much that this is right and that’s wrong and there’s only this way to do it. I had to give myself permission to be more disobedient.” The ultimate defiance came with Dunne’s acceptance of a leading part in Michael Keegan-Dolan’s The Bull, where he essentially played a caricature of his Riverdance self. “It was great to play that role,” he says. “I don’t know what I was releasing, but it was very pleasurable. And I learned a lot from working with Michael. I learned a lot about play. I learned a lot about being more fearless.”
Jean Butler (front) in her What We Hold. Photo by Nir Arieli, Courtesy Butler.
Jean Butler, the original Riverdance female lead, has chosen a more low-key path. She has plotted out a thoughtful career in the contemporary-dance scene, dancing in pieces such as Tere O’Connor’s 2010 postmodern solo Day and creating What We Hold, a promenade-style reimagining of Irish folk, which had its North American premiere in New York City last year. “I think my approach was not to become necessarily a contemporary dancer,” she says, “but to really take time for the first time in my life as a dancer to look at why I move this particular way. To revolutionize something sounds like quite a declaration. And that’s not really where I was coming from. I was really hoping to fly quite quietly under the radar and explore and experiment in a different place.”
Others have attempted to make traditional Irish folk more inclusive, such as Morgan Bullock, the first Black woman to tread the Riverdance stage. Hayden Moon is mapping out a new path as a trans Irish dancer. “The first way to create change in Irish dancing is representation and raising awareness,” Moon told Dance Magazine in 2020. “Because you can’t create change if people aren’t aware of why that change is needed.”
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