Dancer Michael Keegan-Dolan: ‘I do everything slightly backwards’

In 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the UK Conservative Party, Éamon de Valera died and David Beckham was born. Bill Gates and Paul Allen set up a company called Micro-Soft. Druid Theatre Company was founded, and The Bothy Band released their astonishing first album.

Bringing phenomenal skill, energy and power, layered arrangements, harmonies and fusions to traditional Irish music, the album was simply titled 1975. Michael Keegan-Dolan was six years old.

“I remember my parents getting ready to go and see The Bothy Band in Sligo,” the choreographer and dancer says. “I got left behind in the B&B. I remember them being excited and dressing up. I knew then from their body language – especially my father, who didn’t really have much interest in Irish music – that there was something going on, that this was something significant.”

Four years later, in March 1979, I went to see The Bothy Band with my own parents at the National Stadium in Dublin. My chief recollection is the energy: we were all breathing the same beat. Rhythm poured from the stage, and it was electric.

Later that year The Bothy Band would break up, but no one at the venue that night had any sense that the magic these people were creating would ever end.

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Now Keegan-Dolan’s company Teach Damhsa has made a new work, soundtracked by that album in its entirety. The piece, called 1975/Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig, will open to a brown curtain, Keegan-Dolan explains as we watch a run-through at the company’s base on the Dingle peninsula, in Co Kerry.

Brown does seem to colour 1970s Ireland in the mind, but when 1975 bursts on to the stage of Cork Opera House as part of the city’s Midsummer Festival , audiences will see the brown quickly banished. Seven brightly suited dancers will appear, to begin a wild ride through the loves, losses, joys and passions of an era more frequently remembered for its darker narratives.

There will be a game of spin the bottle, and couples will flirt, pair up and stand up. They will jig, and they will reel. It is sexy and intense, proud and vulnerable.

The 1970s in Ireland were similarly multifaceted. There was mass emigration, unemployment, the tragedy of the Troubles. Three members of the Miami Showband were killed following a gig in Banbridge, when their bus was stopped by loyalist terrorists. An IRA bomb at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane in London killed two; a UDA bomb at Dublin Airport killed one.

1975/Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig, staged by Teach Damsa, brings together dancers Rachel Poirier, Jimmy Southward, Amit Noy, Aki Iwamoto and Daniel Myers to celebrate the album 1975 by The Bothy Band. Photograph: Emilija Jefremova

1975/Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig: Rachel Poirier, Jimmy Southward, Amit Noy, Aki Iwamoto, and Daniel Myer. Photograph: Emilija Jefremova

In one passage the dancers create shapes with their bodies, and while on one hand you could read it as the intricacies of human relationships made visible, it might also remind you of FE McWilliam’s Women of Belfast series of sculptures, depicting women flung into wild shapes by explosive blasts.

“I do everything slightly backwards,” Keegan-Dolan says. He prefers to work instinctively, with accumulated knowledge and wisdom expressed through movement and music. Not everything we know and understand happens in words.

“I wanted to make a piece to an album,” he continues. “And I thought, if we’re going to do it, we’d better pick a good one.” Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison was in the frame for a while, but the choreographer’s thoughts kept coming back to The Bothy Band.

The album’s 50th anniversarty, last year, helped crystallise the choice, as the piece became more than an expression of a single moment: a celebration of the eras since. As Keegan-Dolan puts it, “The Bothy Band made possibility through their music.”

That possibility, he says, is there in today’s sense of confidence in Irish culture. In 2011 Keegan-Dolan’s dance company at the time, Fabulous Beast, was making Rian with the musician Liam Ó Maonlaí . “We talked a lot about Ó Riada Sa Gaiety,” he says of the album recording of Seán Ó Riada’s final public performance, in 1969.

Keegan-Dolan’s father had worked with TK Whitaker . “He was one of those civil servants that went to France with Whitaker to learn about how the Europeans were doing business, and I guess, in some ways, culture.

The Bothy Band: Their album 1975 had its 50th anniversary last year. Photograph: Gems/Redferns

I hadn’t heard that recording in so many years, and every moment was a surprise. For it to come blasting out of speakers, and the dancers blasting and lepping in the air. Getting your heart beating faster, like when I was playing with the lads back then

—  Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill

“So when I think of 1975 I think of those men in 1969, who had grown up in rural Ireland, who had moved to urban Ireland, who are now trying to build a nati…