After root-and-branch reworkings of Giselle and Swan Lake, the celebrated Irish choreographer is back with Nobodaddy, a trip ‘through the bottomless pit’

‘I keep making pieces that I think maybe no one outside of Ireland will like,” says Michael Keegan-Dolan. “And so far, I’ve been wrong.”

Indeed: his work comes from a particular place, but Keegan-Dolan’s company Teaċ Daṁsa plays successfully all over the world. The choreographer and director is speaking to me not far from where he was born, in north Dublin, where his new piece Nobodaddy has been playing to sold-out houses at the Dublin theatre festival. He asks if it mattered that I, a Londoner, hadn’t got all the Irish references in it. Well, my experience was certainly enriched by a local friend pointing out a characteristically Irish way of saying “yeah, yeah, yeah” on an inbreath (technically, it is the “pulmonic ingressive”), for example, or giving me some backstory to Irish showbands. In the end I say: what I don’t know I don’t know, the piece just needs to work enough without me needing to know. He laughs and nods (he laughs a lot, often at himself), and I reckon we’ve arrived at one answer why his work crosses borders: there’s Irishness in it, but it’s not an entry requirement.