Michael Keegan-Dolan/Teaċ Daṁsa, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons

Michael Keegan-Dolan/ Teaċ Daṁsa, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons, Sadler’s Wells East, September 17, 2025

How to be a Dancer in Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons is the kind of performance that comes about when the complexity of choreographer and director Michael Keegan-Dolan’s productions for Teaċ Daṁsa is reduced to an autobiography with a cast of two. The story-telling, the lyricism, the messy, prop-filled stage, the Irish passion and the passion for Ireland are all still there in full measure but the story-telling is essentially turned inwards to the story-teller himself. Not only is Keegan-Dolan talking about himself but he is on stage in the spotlight, directed by his long-time collaborators, co-performer Rachel Poirier and lighting designer Adam Silverman. 

Keegan-Dolan has no difficulty with telling stories. He has a gift for it, and when the subject is his own life he has no shortage of tales to tell, beginning with a fable about an egg that ends with the admonition, ‘Don’t look back, don’t look back’. But this is exactly what Keegan-Dolan does for most of the next 80 minutes in episodes that start inside his mother’s womb and trace his development as a dancer and choreographer in what the freesheet describes as ‘a story of innocence and experience, sexuality and shame, humiliation and defiance, identity and nationality, endings and ancestry’. I’m not sure where the figure of seventy-two thousand came from, and the lessons he recalls are never easy, but together the title gives an idea of the depth and breadth of Keegan-Dolan’s brimming imagination that goes into creating his works and the lessons learned from a life lived fully in the theatre. The stage setting — a cross between a workshop and a gym conceived by Hyemi Shin — is an illustration of carefully designed anarchy from which his work takes shape. 

But where is the space for the other member of this cast? If you were only to listen to the show, you would hear Keegan-Dolan’s stories that coherently link the beginning and the end. In between you would hear Poirier’s voice sometimes singing, sometimes barking, and sometimes reciting poetry; she doesn’t tell stories so much as illustrate and direct them. But if Keegan-Dolan is the contents of the show we see on the stage of Sadler’s Wells East, Poirier is the binding that holds it all together. Where Keegan-Dolan guides the audience with his verbal imagination, Poirier guides with her lyricism. She moves from theatrical realism — her muscular entrance in working clothes and safety goggles brandishing a metal cutter to open the theatre box of props — to lyrical improvisation in her heroic and intensely musical interpretation of Ravel’s Bolero. 

But however effective their respective roles may be and how Keegan-Dolan and Poirier clearly complement each other as performers, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons is a series of anecdotes wrapped in sketches stitched together with two engaging artistic threads that are not woven tightly enough to hold the framework together. Keegan-Dolan is central to his own narrative while Poirier joins somewhere along the way. And even once she has arrived she still runs parallel to Keegan-Dolan’s flowing autobiographical episodes. Only when she dances the Bolero does the narrative come to a halt because there is nowhere for it to accompany her, and this creates an artificial hiatus in the production. Such is the direction and force of Keegan-Dolan’s monologue that when Poirier has finished dancing the Bolero it’s as if he asks : ’Where was I?’ before continuing his narrative. Tellingly, the applause is brief at the end of the solo; it should have been greeted with much greater enthusiasm because it’s a beautiful interpretation, but the narrative context of the show overshadows it. For me it’s where the integrity of the seventy-two thousand lessons is compromised. The show is engaging, it’s fun, it’s beautifully performed, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.