Writer: Michael Keegan-Dolan
Choreographers: Michael Keegan-Dolan and Rachel Poirier
Directors: Rachel Poirier and Adam Silverman
It starts with an enormous wooden packing crate, from which various props are removed and staged. Chairs, breeze blocks, a mirrorball and even a bicycle are extracted by Michael Keegan-Dolan and Rachel Poirier before embarking on an enjoyable piece of storytelling.
The 80-minute piece mainly consists of Keegan-Dolan recounting how he discovered his love of, and eventual career in, dance through a series of comic (and some not so comic) anecdotal vignettes. Classical excerpts intermingle with pop tunes from the likes of Talking Heads and Men Without Hats as the young Keegan-Dolan engages with music and dance.
However, Keegan-Dolan rarely actually dances himself. That responsibility is ceded to his choreography partner Rachel Poirier, who also co-directs with Adam Silverman. Poirier is a delight, contrasting Keegan-Dolan’s drily wry narration with plenty of clowning and loose-limbed dance.
Some of the juxtapositions feel natural, some amusing. Along the way, Keegan-Dolan discusses being dropped from ballet school when it was clear his pigeon toes would never turn out in the expected way, and his first experiences of sex were tainted by his Irish education’s determination to keep children ignorant of anything useful.
There is also a lot of anti-Irish sentiment expressed in Keegan-Dolan’s direction. In one story, he relates how his breezy welcome to the local newsagent suddenly turns sour the day after the IRA’s Manchester bombing in 1996. They culminate in the discovery that an ancestor played a pivotal role in 1916’s Easter Rising.
But as revealing as some of these anecdotes are, they are also a little too fragmentary and unfinished. One minute, we are with an impoverished Keegan-Dolan in a bedsit “the size of a toilet”; the next, he is working as a choreographer in Germany, with no sense of how his fortunes changed.
One such anecdote features Keegan-Dolan recounting a revelation he had with a yoga master. Quite what that revelation is, we are not sure, for the anecdote ends with him holding one end of the packing crate in the air, forming an A-frame with his body, as Poirier, who has been in the crate, emerges to perform an energetic, full-throated dance to a full-length rendition of Ravel’s Boléro.
Poirier’s dance mirrors how the piece persists at the same tempo throughout, building its crescendo through the addition of more and more orchestral instruments. It is a magnificent spectacle in its own right, the highlight of the evening’s work.
And yet it also feels removed from Keegan-Dolan’s storytelling. It feels as if this evening cannot quite decide if it is performance art or an illustrated lecture. What it isn’t is a cohesive dance piece. And while the comedy, the self-reflection, the clowning and the choreography are each charming in their own way, one yearns for a piece that combines them more successfully.
Runs until 20 September 2025
