In 2003 a dance theatre company based in Co Longford provided the surprise hit of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Now Fabulous Beast return to the fray with an energetic, violent, full-blooded version of the ancient legent of the Tain Bo Cuailnge. Belinda McKeon talks to dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan about unleashing the beast.
PHILIP DAWSON, one half of the team behind the renowed Shawbrook Dance Theatre in Legan, Co Longford, remembers a day in early summer of this year, watching the face of the dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan as the pair surveyed a building on the Shawbrook grounds. The building was a hay shed, the traces of agriculture still clear to see, since Shawbrook was, until very recently, a working farm as well as the literal home of Philip and Anica Dawson and the creative home of the many young dancers who pass through the theatre and its school every year.
Dawson doesn't use the word "dubious" as he describes the reaction to this structure of Keegan-Dolan and the other members of his company, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, originally set up in 1997. But it's clear that there were some nerves at Shawbrook that day.
Within a worryingly short space of time, this place without even any walls to speak of had to become a large-scale, flexible rehearsal room for Fabulous Beast's new production. The company was eager to get to work on the piece, an exploration of the ancient legend of the Táin Bó Cuailnge; audiences at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) meanwhile, would be eager to see the results, memories of Fabulous Beast's previous production - Giselle, the undisputed hit of the 2003 festival - still fresh in their minds. The new piece needed a space in which to grow.
And, just a few weeks later, it has. The company is in situ, rehearsing all day in the new space, sleeping by night in the dormitories usually occupied by young students, and eating together the generous meals prepared by the Dawsons and their helpers.
The former barn is now a studio, a space just as sophisticated as the other converted sheds and outhouses around the peaceful grounds of Shawbrook; Dawson turned it around with the same gusto with which he has turned a byre into a dormitory for residing students, and with which he is currently turning a milking parlour into a sauna and pool for muscles aching from hours of training and practice. And the new piece is not so much coming together as stomping its way there, bellowing itself into being. The place - not just the rehearsal room, but the midlands terrain in which it, and Shawbrook, are set - could hardly be more fitting for the piece Keegan-Dolan, its author, has called The Bull.
Keegan-Dolan, himself from this part of Co Longford - near Edgeworthstown, the birthplace of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and on the border with Westmeath - had long held a notion of creating a work based on the Táin, the tale of Queen Maeve's jealous and catastrophic pursuit of Ulster's prize bull. When, after the success of Giselle, former DTF director Fergus Linehan and the Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE), London commissioned another work, he found himself wondering whether to approach the story regarded by many as having been fully and definitively told by the 1969 translation of Thomas Kinsella, accompanied by the brush drawings of Louis le Brocquy; both artists are now as bound up with the legend as is Maeve herself, or as, indeed, is the coveted beast.
But two chance sightings as Keegan-Dolan was riding his motorbike along the road from Mullingar made up his mind. "I was thinking about the piece," he says, "and didn't I see a big, brown limousin bull in the field. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I saw the sign. For the Táin Trail [ a tourist trail through areas and sites mentioned in the legend] and I thought, I'm going to do the Táin. That's it."
That, in a sense, was Keegan-Dolan's last moment alone with the idea; from the moment it began to journey towards realisation, it became the property, the focus, the endeavour, of the company. Unusually for a director, Keegan-Dolan will not talk about the piece without having as many members of the company as possible to join in the conversation. The result, for the outsider attempting to glimpse into their world, can be baffling, even frustrating. After four weeks spent living and creating together in such close confinement, the 14-member group speak about the production in a type of shorthand, and mere elucidation of the structure of The Bull, of the way in which this production reimagines the Táin narrative - though it is not, Keegan-Dolan insists, primarily a version of the Táin - is slow in coming. Mainly, the performers want to talk about the experience of working together in a range of disciplines - acting, dancing, singing, music, rhythm - and about each person's speciality is shared with and, within the piece, taken on for a time by the others.
"The group is exceptional," says Keegan-Dolan. "It's a really interesting group of people. You have an Irish percussionist. A piano-playing, acting composer from Rome. An actor from Norwich. An actress from the west of Ireland. A dancer-actor from Bratislava. A counter-tenor from Naples, an actor from Cork, a dancer from France ... very eclectic. And nobody is good at just one thing, there are no categories. The dancers are singing, the singers are dancing, the actors are dancing, the drummers are dancing ..."
But what exactly are they drumming, dancing, singing and acting? Keegan-Dolan is loathe to reveal the details, but from the scraps of information he will concede, The Bull looks likely to glow with the same sort of humour and dynamism - and, likely too, given the calibre of the performers, with the same degree of beauty and intelligence - as did Giselle. But comparisons are limiting, and unfair; enough to say that the setting is once more the midlands, the era a modern one, and the situation seething with dark emotion. And, perhaps, that all but two of the cast from Giselle appear in The Bull, along with six other performers.
Though Keegan-Dolan sounds most excited by the possibilities opened up by the involvement in the piece of rhythm artists such as the percussionist Robbie Harris and the dancer Colin Dunne, he has created, too, a strong cast of characters. They live out the story of the Táin in starkly - and, by the sounds of it, bleakly hilarious - contemporary terms. The Maeve in The Bull is Maeve Fogarty, doyenne of one of the two families whose struggle is at the centre of the piece. Maeve, to be played by Olwen Fouéré, has a husband and two children. She and her husband also have the services of one Miroslav Kont, a hired hitman from the Czech Republic, while Maeve has the somewhat more different services of a lover, Fergus O'Rourke. "Because," explains Keegan-Dolan, "Maeve has money invested in a musical called Celtic Bitch, in which Fergus is the lead dancer". Deliciously, the role of Fergus will be played by Dunne, well known as a former lead in Riverdance, who has been leading the cast through their strides in Irish dancing for the past number of weeks.
Muscling up to the Fogarty family, ostensibly over the matter of a bull, will be the Cullens: old Mr Cullen, his brothers Donnie and Big Bernie, his son and his son's librarian lover. In the mix, too, will be a Nigerian priest and Morrigan, the goddess of death. On a mundane level, the conflict between the families is easy to grasp; it comes down to money and social standing. "The Fogartys are nouveau riche who've come up to the city," explains Keegan-Dolan. "They live in a five-bedroom mansion with underfloor heating. Whereas the Cullens have stayed old school. They're plasterers and they just live in a two-bedroom cottage and all ... live together." (The laughter that greets the last comment suggests that perversity may be alive and well in the Cullen household, but that's just a wild guess.)
It's easy now to see why Keegan-Dolan insists so vehemently that what he and the company are putting together is not "the Táin". This, refreshingly, sounds like no Táin studied by past or present generations of Leaving Cert students, or followed by readers of the Lady Gregory or even the Kinsella translation. If it is not a revision, then it is, in less loaded language, definitely a looking-again; a looking again at the deepest currents running through the legend, currents previously ignored or downplayed for reasons of decorum or fear.
"When I went back to it," says Keegan-Dolan, "I hadn't really an understanding of the story. I remembered Queen Maeve, and I remembered that she wanted a bull." That much was enough, he says, to interest him in making a piece; the "two really powerful archetypes" of the queen and the bull would have yielded plenty on their own. But then Keegan-Dolan returned to the Kinsella translation. "And I was really quite shocked at the violence in it. And then I became excited by the disparity between the version we're told as children and the version as translated."
He would have been much more attracted to the story as a child, he says, "if someone had told me the real story. It would have been fantastic. You know, all riding each other, killing each other ..."
Fouéré agrees; she finds "refreshing", she says, the fact that the action is spurred by a woman who is not just powerful but immensely and incessantly violent. "It's only fairly recently in Irish drama that women have been allowed to be monsters and to be human at the same time."
"Every generation," says Keegan-Dolan, "tries to make culture something you can take to the table rather than really what it is, which is often incredibly scary, threatening, challenging, stuff about what it is to be human. You know? So that's why I stuck with it."
