Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
Described as ‘one of the most daring and highly original dance theatre companies in the world’ (The Times) Fabulous Beast is led by Irish director and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan. Recent work includes a critically acclaimed new staging of Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece The Rite of Spring, a Fabulous Beast co-production with English National Opera, which played to more than 14,000 people at the London Coliseum in November 2009, and was nominated for an Olivier Award.
Fabulous Beast was previously best known for several ground-breaking and controversial productions, delivered in a unique style blending narrative and physical theatre, dance, speech and song and set in the Irish Midlands. These include two other Olivier Award-nominated productions Giselle (2003) and The Bull (2005), and also James Son of James (2007), which were co-produced with the Dublin Theatre Festival and bite at the Barbican Centre (London), of which Fabulous Beast is an Artistic Associate. Fabulous Beast’s productions prior to Giselle included: Sunday Lunch (1997); Fragile (1999); The Flowerbed (2000); and The Christmas Show (2001).
Fabulous Beast has gained wider international recognition in recent years through performances at major cultural festivals around the world. Giselle has been performed at the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas, USA (2004), the Festival Dialog Wroclaw, Poland (2007), the New Zealand International Arts Festival (2008), Perth International Arts Festival, Australia (2009), Sydney Festival (2010) and at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre (2010). It was seen again by Irish audiences at the 2008 Galway Arts Festival. In the Spring of 2008 the Dance Touring Partnership presented an extensive UK tour of James Son of James with support from Arts Council England. The Bull was most recently performed as part of spielzeit’europa at the Berliner Festspiele in November 2008, its London premiere having won Keegan-Dolan the UK Critic’s Circle Award for Best Modern Choreography.
Fabulous Beast is supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council. International touring is supported by Culture Ireland.