How To Be A Dancer In Seventy-Two Thousand Easy Lessons

A powerful coming of age work that is playful, provoking and deadly serious.

From an Ireland in the 1970s to the present day, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons is a dance and theatre, music ritual that bends boundaries between what is lived and what is remembered, between history, destiny, fact and fantasy.

Written and choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan and directed by life-time collaborators, dancer Rachel Poirier and lighting designer, Adam Silverman, How to be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons, has toured nationally and internationally and was nominated for a Sky Arts Award in 2024.

A co-production with the Gate Theatre and premiered at the 2022 Dublin Theatre Festival How to be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons has become a worldwide success, with performances at The Galway International Arts Festival; St Ann’s Warehouse, New York; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; The Everyman Theatre, Cork as part of the SFSH Festival; The Pavillion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire; the Cervantino Festival, Mexico; Teatros del Canal in Madrid; Féile na Bealtaine Arts Festival, Dingle and at Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, County Kerry.

How to be a Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons is a work that travels down a rabbit hole of nationality, identity, xenophobia, ancestor worship, shame, death, defiance, love and dance.