How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons, Teaċ Daṁsa review - a riveting account of a life in dance

Anyone who has followed the trajectory of choreographer-director Michael Keegan-Dolan and his West Kerry-based company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance) will know by now to expect the unexpected.

Such as a Swan Lake whose storyline, in part a searing attack on the abuses of the Catholic church, bore so little resemblance to the original that you might think you’d come to the wrong theatre until the spectacular finale seen through a blizzard of white feathers.

His staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (a co-production with English National Opera) is up there with the finest, pitting Irish hare coursers in dog masks against young women in flowered dresses whose first line of defence is to pour another cup of tea. More often than not, though, he has been happy to abandon the classical canon for Irish myth and folk music. MÀM, a show described as "90 minutes of ritualised ecstasy", meshed rave culture with the sublime virtuosity of concertina player Cormac Begley. Yet not even this catalogue of wild off-piste imaginings can prepare you for MK-D’s 2023 venture, How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons. Too bad it has taken more than two years to arrive at Sadler’s Wells East for its UK premiere.

The first shock is the intimacy. Gone are the milling crowds on stage. There is no one but the choreographer and his long-time collaborator and life partner Rachel Poirier, a highly versatile dancer who started out with Rambert (both pictured right). The relationship of these two for the next 70 minutes is something akin to magician and assistant, except that MK-D mostly talks, while Poirier arranges props, recites poetry, performs a comedy mime wearing a beard and sings French chansons, sometimes perched precariously atop a wardrobe. She also delivers periodic bursts of dance, short enough to make you crave more, until finally she launches into a long, free-form response to Ravel’s Boléro, the entire 15 minutes of it, which by any reckoning is something of a marathon. It inevitably brings to mind (and this must be deliberate) the dance of the Chosen Maiden which closes The Rite of Spring. Poirier stops short of dancing herself to death, but she flings herself at the floor several times in succession with alarming effect. The tragic intensity is punctured by the fact that MK-D, while watching intently over his shoulder, is holding a 7ft wardrobe for the entire duration.

As for his monologue, it starts at the very beginning with his passage along his mother’s birth canal. Again, those alert to dance clues will think of the birth of Apollo in the opening segment of the Balanchine/Stravinsky ballet – but this can only be a deeply ironic nod, given the distinctly ungodlike picture MK-D proceeds to paint for us of his north Dublin upbringing among his 12 siblings. When he reels off their names in a single breath it’s quite the tongue-twister. And it has to be said that, as confessional monologues go, this one is delightful on the ear. His Irish brogue is both musical and distinct, and his timing impeccable.

As in all the best personal stories, the particular becomes universal. We learn of young Michael’s reactions to the arrival of tape recording, the arrival of TV. It was the experience of seeing his mother, dwarfed by a pile of ironing, transformed by the sight of Gene Kelly on the family TV, that made him want to be a dancer, “so that I could lift my mother’s mood that way”. He describes (in movement as well as words) his first forays on the floor at the local disco, when he’s told to “Stop dancing like a fucking queen”. He describes his first ballet class at 18, and the shaming discovery that copious applications of Lynx for Men are next to useless as deodorant.

The Troubles and Anglo-Irish history are a constant background hum. “I’d heard about knee-capping but nothing about love-making,” he notes, astonished that a pack of condoms, in the UK in the early 1980s, could be got without a prescription. He talks us through his nascent love-life, and first professional contracts as a young dancer – all disastrous. His pigeon toes ruled out ballet. An audition for the high priestess of contemporary dance was embarassing. Falling scenery ended his short career in musical theatre, mid-show. A demonstration of how this happened is horribly funny.

This makes it sound like an evening of stand-up, which it isn’t. The difficulty in conveying the emotional impact of How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons is that its form has no precedent. Michael Keegan-Dolan is not out to tell us what a brilliant young dancer he was, or what a cool maker and shaker. Quite the reverse. The laughs are all at his expense. And yet it’s also true that he stands before us as a feted and profoundly gifted creator of extraordinary events on the international theatre stage. How he got there, how he finally found his voice, remains a mystery - a mystery to us and possibly also to Michael Keegan-Dolan. In a final segment, he and Rachel Poirier simply sit side by side, eyes closed, and listen – as we do – to the resounding orchestral finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird. It’s magnificent, and very moving. Some things just have to be experienced.

• How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons is at Sadler's Wells East, E20, to 20 September
• More dance reviews on theartsdesk