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As he is the bete noire of Ireland's theatrical community, it seems ironic that the only quiet place I can find on Islington's high street to talk to Fabulous Beast founder and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan is a tacky Irish theme pub.
"The Irish have a great pedigree in
playwriting but for what I am doing there is no pedigree," he laughs. "We are at the coalface of that. But we get funded in Ireland so I have to choose my words carefully. It's politically charged in Ireland because there is limited money and there are lots of people who want funding.
"New Zealand has a similar problem to Ireland because we are both such strong sports-loving countries. In Ireland, our Minister of Culture is also the Minister of Sport, so the same guy is making the decisions about how much the arts get and how much the rugby team gets."
The County Longford resident is in London to prepare for the British tour of James Son Of James, the third instalment in the ambitious Midlands Trilogy that began with Giselle - a radical reinterpretation of Theophile Gautier's classic 1841 ballet involving a Bratislavan line-dancer and Irish folk songs.
Giselle makes its New Zealand debut at the International Arts Festival this week, while the trilogy's second production continued with The Bull, based on a classic Irish myth.
"I first started working on Giselle around 2001 and, for me, it was a make or break thing," recalls Keegan-Dolan, who worked on shows for the likes of Robert Lepage before forming Fabulous Beast in 1997.
"I was really getting to the point of giving up and this was the last thing I was going to do. It gave me a good attitude because I was trying to do something completely new.
"I was using language for the first time and singing and I kind of created a new way to create the piece."
Fabulous Beast are so eclectic that even Keegan-Dolan struggles to define what they do. "One of the problems that we run into all the time is that people don't know what we are," he says. "We get reviewed by the theatre critics in Ireland and by the dance critics in London. The departmentalisation of theatre, all the specialisation, always involves the death of something.
"We dance, sing and act. The way I work is to keep it a bit freer. It's very disciplined and structured but, within that, there is a lot of spontaneity and freedom; we mix stuff up."
Keegan-Dolan admits he did not know what to expect when Giselle made its debut at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2003.
"It was almost like starting again," he says. "I remember going to the previews and no one had any idea what we had. The cast didn't have a clue what they were in and I was working with some Slovakians who were just learning to speak English.
"You do the show and people are just going mad in the audience: 'What is this? This is amazing.' We were getting invitations to do the show from all over the world."
However, Giselle has not won over all the critics. "Our second performance was at Yale University in Connecticut and it was supposed to be a showcase for an American tour," says Keegan-Dolan. "When the Americans saw it, they all walked out, they didn't know how to take it ... Since then, we have never got to go back to the States."
Fortunately, Giselle was better received when next staged at London's Barbican.
"I was so determined for this thing to work in London that I spent weeks on it before the Barbican presentation," says Keegan-Dolan.
"It did well in London, got good reviews and then got nominated for an Olivier award, which is establishment theatre but useful in terms of allowing us to keep working."
What: Giselle with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
Where and when: Shed 6, Wellington Waterfront, Mar 8-12
