Bullish about dance

'I hate talking about my work, because nobody fucking understands me." He says it with a broad grin, though, so it's not precious. Michael Keegan Dolan is in the middle of watching his set being built at the O'Reilly theatre in Dublin. Bits of wood and metal are stacked in piles, structures being levered into place. There is a long trough at the front of the stage, with a pierced metal tube being raised above it. He grins like a child at Christmas, albeit a slightly wild-eyed one. The trough is for the final scene. Not to ruin it for anyone, but the front rows should dress for inclement weather.

Dolan smiles vigorously walking through the apparent chaos. He is small, 11 stone, and would be petit if not so well built. His hands seem to lead his words, describing scenes and emotions as he talks, sometimes manically. His face is young and fresh, though his head is shaved bald and his eyes crease into deep crow's feet when he smiles, which is constantly.

Although the critics don't understand his work, he won't let them into his rehearsals. "Because it's distracting. It puts you on the defensive." No wonder they don't understand him. He replies with an invitation to spend six weeks working with the company – "and then you'd get inside it".

He takes his work, and preparation seriously. The company lived together for rehearsals, at the Shawbrook dance school in Longford, across the border from Michael's home in Westmeath. He starts each day at 5.30 am with an hour and a half's exercises, mostly yoga, and then teaches a company movement class for another hour and a half. And then the day's work starts. Every day, six days a week, right through rehearsals.

"I exist –", he breaks off, starts again: "most of my day is spent working with my body". This gives him another perspective, one difficult to share through words, with a critic. "I don't speak the same language as them, so you feel very misunderstood."

"The way I work is so disciplined, we live together and we train six days a week at half seven. When you (do that) you're going to find out about yourself."

He broke big exactly two years ago, at the Dublin Theatre Festival, with his production of Giselle. "I thought I was going to get famous", he says, "but I didn't". Giselle was received rapturously in Dublin, and offers to tour it flooded in.

"Presenters – they were all rolling up to see it and many people pencilled it and a lot of people booked it. But when push came to shove, they all chickened out."

"It's a tricky world that I have to exist in. Both aesthetically and practically, it's quite narrow where I can actually present the work, in terms of where it fits. The work I do is quite big, it's populated by a lot of people. Not being a brand name, people are still quite nervous about taking a risk on me."

"It can be a bit rough psychologically when people are slagging it off in earshot of you. I've had people come up to my face and say it was shit; I've had big presenters in America, who've come up to me before the show, walk right by me afterwards."

And this is the supposedly refined world of dance theatre. It sounds more like Hollywood.

"It's even (worse) because there's even less money. When there's less money, people act even more brutal."

The Barbican in London came through on their offer to host Giselle, and then when the chips were down for his latest show, The Bull, stumped up €150,000 to make sure it made it to the stage. Though, "there were days for sure when I thought it wasn't going to happen".

The investment has come good, he thinks. "I'm really happy with it. I actually love this piece. It's the first time I've had that, that no matter what anyone says to me, I don't give a fuck, I really like the piece."

"I've got ten days to get it right", he notes, and it seems like all the time in the world.

He starts with a script. "It's good to have a structure, a shape, a 50-page thing with a beginning, middle and an end, to start off with. The money people like to see something as well. Then you bring it to the guys (his company) and they just rip it apart."

The rehearsal process works with that, paring it down. "You'd very rarely add anything, you just get rid of stuff and rid of stuff and rid of stuff and rid of stuff; try not to say anything twice."

Dolan was 17, at school in St Paul's, Raheny, when he realised he wanted to be a dancer. He was always interested in the body, though his main outlet was rugby – at which, he says, he wasn't any good. "I was quite uncoordinated but I was very quick." (He stills loves the game. Brian O'Driscoll, he says, is "amazing at his art form, he makes me so proud to be Irish in some ways". He says that self consciously, laughing. "I know that sounds terribly retrogressive in some ways.")

Then, in his last year in school, one of the Billy Barry teachers came to the school to do a show, and he had his revelation. He started going to jazz ballet classes at the Billy Barry school, and set his sights on studying ballet. When the CAO offers came around, he got law in Trinity, but ignored it and headed for London. He got a scholarship to the Central School of Ballet, "because I had a penis, and they needed penises to populate the school".

"I think it's because if they have boys in the year it's more attractive to girls, because they get to do pas de deux, which most schools can't do because there's no boys around."

From day one he was choreographing bits and pieces, but he had a lot of attitude, and wasn't much of a dancer.

"I was young and arrogant, but I was crap. So it was a very complicated combination, because I was worst in my class, but I was the brightest, I'd the most... capacity to think but, physically, I was very uncoordinated and very stiff. So I was kind of a disaster."

He got thrown out a few times, "for being highly opinionated". How, precisely? "I used to tell my superiors to go fuck themselves." He makes it sound perfectly reasonable. Who wouldn't? But when he talks about ballet, it's not so surprising there were tensions.

"Ballet is fucked. It's the most fucked thing. It's fucked because it's based on a form of training that gives the person nothing, just takes from them; it's abusive; their bodies are all destroyed; by the time they're 30, they can't fucking walk, most of them.

"It's based completely on superficial aesthetics that are based on nothing. Ballet fundamentally is based on Indian dance, which was already fucked by the time the ballet people started copying it. It's a perversion of a perversion of a perversion of a perversion."

But isn't it beautiful?

"No!" The thought is ridiculous. "Skinny girls with white skin with small tits with thin legs, with a guy with a big chin with his cock pointed upwards walking around in tights..."

"Perfect people doing tricks to classical music", he says. "Where's the human in that, what happens to the person? There's an awful lot of abuse and destruction of people, people get destroyed and thrown on the heap at the end."

In newsprint, Dolan sounds angry, arrogant, maybe even cold. But none of this comes across in person. He swears with alacrity, making his language literally colourful. He criticises things with an honesty and earnestness that makes it endearing. The honesty goes with someone who lives so much – and speaks, even – through his body. And he smiles widely, and laughs constantly, the crow's feet creasing out from his eyes, while his arms jab out in front or mime whatever verb he's using (quite likely to be a vulgar one).

Despite the troubles, he got work from ballet school, and his star rose quickly as a choreographer in London during his 20s. Then Peter Hall asked him to work with him at the National in London as his movement director, on a massive production of the Oedipus Plays.

Hall, he says, "used to fall asleep in rehearsals. He had me running around like a dog for 13 weeks. I had all the responsibilities but no empowerment."

And Dolan found himself working with "21 actors who were all physically inept, even the ones who were supposedly great physical actors".

And his brother died from cancer. It wasn't a good time. At the end of the run: "It was just like – is that it? Is that theatre? A great director, great actors, great designer, great ideas and it's just shit. If that's it, then I wanted to do something else."

"I tried to get into the Royal Veterinary College in London and they asked me to resit the A-levels and I said fuck that. So I became a bicycle courier... and I cycled away the depression of my brother dying and of Peter Hall."

"It was grim, cycling all day, wind and rain – it was kind of a form of sado-masochistic ritual imposed upon myself. I liked the idea of being hugely physical, not having to talk to anybody, so I cycled 60 miles a day, I cycled till I couldn't speak and then I'd go home and go to sleep and then I'd get up again."

He did that for a year and a half. And then Cork's Firkin Crane centre (now the Institute for Choreography and Dance) called. They'd been given some funding. Would he do a show?

"So I got together a group of people and made a piece and it's just gone on and on and on since then." He called the company Fabulous Beast, a name he got from a tarot card book.

"And that was it."

This year's show, The Bull, is a retelling of the The Táin. "I remembered it from school, the idea of a queen and a bull, it's just brilliant, it's simple.

"I live very near the Táin trail. I was passing that point on my motorcycle one day, trying to think what to do for the show, and I saw a Limousin bull, a beautiful Limousin standing on a hill, and then the Táin Trail sign was just there." So the idea stuck. When he read The Táin, in Thomas Kinsella's translation, he was struck by the violence, and the depth of feeling for the land.

He wants to "tell The Táin the way it was, rather than the way it has been translated by Lady Gregory, or even by Kinsella, or maybe by the monks in the 8th century – to to get past all of that bullshit and actually what's really going on with it.

"It's about people, with contradictory needs, coming into conflicts and they're all suffering... there's a huge amount of death in it. Maeve has a terrible time and it's all self inflicted, cause she can't see clearly after a point."

"It's in our blood, the whole land thing."

Though Dolan was raised in Dublin, in Clontarf, by a housewife mother and civil servant father, he grew up knowing well his father's land in Longford.

"My father's a bog man. He's a very intelligent man, very sophisticated, but when you get him down to his land in Longford he walks the boundary, and he spits.

"I have more time for those guys down there, who are authentic, rather than people living up here pretending to be something they're not."

And after 15 years in London, Dolan and his wife now live in Westmeath, on the Inny river.

"I love the kind of brutality of it, the honesty of it. I love uneven ground; I hate walking on flat ground, it hurts my legs." It's not a moan, but almost a spiritual comment. "The city", he gestures around, "there's too many people".

"I love the dark at night. I love the quiet."

Before Giselle, he says, "I'd worked in silence". Now, he mixes song and textual theatre with dance, and is more a director than choreographer. (He has brought in the former Riverdance lead dancer, Colin Dunne, as choreographer on The Bull.)

From Billy Barry to ballet to choreography to movement director to bicycle courier to director. "I didn't wake up till I was about 32, and then I really woke up." And when he did, he knew what he wanted to do.

"To tell stories. To the people who populate our society. That's what we are, we're storytellers, and I tend to tell things very physically.

"If I had of gone to Trinity to read English I might have been doing it a different way." He didn't though. The Department of English at Trinity must be crossing themselves in thanks. But there'd be a big gap in the Theatre Festival. p

? More: The Bull is at the O'Reilly Theatre, 3-15 October, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Booking (01) 677 8899 or www.dublintheatrefestival.com