How to Be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons review: Michael Keegan-Dolan’s bewitching dance theatre

How to Be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons

Gate Theatre

★★★★☆

At the beginning of Michael Keegan-Dolan’s bewildering, bewitching dance-theatre piece, a wooden box sits on a barren stage while Keegan-Dolan and Rachel Poirier sit on plastic chairs on either side of the proscenium, waiting for the audience to settle, for their own show to begin.

The box contains the elements they will use to construct their chimerical performance. Like a magician’s top hat, it contains an improbable collection of props they will use to tell their story: black-tie costumes and plastic sacks, concrete blocks and a helium cylinder, microphones on long, loose leads and a bright-pink children’s bike. If the items seem familiar to fans of Keegan-Dolan’s work, it is because they are the choreographer’s trademark tools. How to Be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons is, in one way, a personal story of Keegan-Dolan’s life in dance. These are the magical objects that have helped him reach the point where that story is worth listening to.

The narrative Keegan-Dolan has assembled from fragments of his past casts him as a perpetual outsider. As the youngest in a large family, he fights to be heard. Pigeon-toed, he finds connection through sport difficult and is gently ousted from ballet school for the same poor foot form

The narrative that Keegan-Dolan has assembled from fragments of his past casts him as a perpetual outsider. As the youngest in a large family, he fights to be heard. Pigeon-toed, he finds peer connection through sport difficult and is gently ousted from ballet school for the same poor foot form. An Irishman in 1980s London, he is subjected to racist abuse. The chronological line charts his coming of age, and the anecdotes are relayed to us by Keegan-Dolan with comfortable amusement and a series of hilarious wigs.

What is perhaps most challenging about the form of storytelling is the lack of dance. For the first two-thirds of the performance Keegan-Dolan and Poirier incant William Blake poems and sing songs by Talking Heads and Rodgers and Hammerstein, a musical register that is both classic and pop. There is gentle movement, but much of it is in chairs.

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However, there is a greater narrative being slowly revealed in Adam Silverman’s confident, slowly paced production, a joint project between the Gate and Keegan-Dolan’s Teac Damsa. As he and Poirier subtly swap costumes (designed with tasteful restraint by Hyemi Shin), the relationship being constructed by the two performers becomes clear. When Keegan-Dolan inters Poirier in and then frees her from the wooden box, which is now a coffin, a 14-minute dance sequence finally begins.

The pair’s choreographed routine demonstrates the precise and joyful looseness that is a trademark of Keegan-Dolan’s work and Poirier’s somatic style. She is his energy, his life’s meaning, his vocation released

Ravel’s Bolero offers the perfect level of building energy and cathartic release, while the choreographed routine demonstrates the precise and joyful looseness that is a trademark of Keegan-Dolan’s work and Poirier’s somatic style. She is his energy, his life’s meaning, his vocation released.

The production ends with the two performers sitting side by side at the centre of the stage for an elongated moment of absolute stillness. Nothing is happening, but we watch them carefully, noticing how fully alive their bodies are in their composed quietude. We notice too how fully alive we are, as an active audience, both emotionally and physically engaged.

Runs at the Gate Theatre, Dublin 1, until Saturday, October 8th, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival