The view is even less heartening. To the front is a windswept road, while a peaty scrubland stretches away to the rear. Every morning, the field is strewn with dead sheep, the handiwork of a crazed local dog. It's a barren landscape that might have been plucked straight from the bog-gothic novels of Pat McCabe, or from the anarchic settings of Keegan-Dolan's own shows. "Some people like looking at icebergs, some people like looking at lakes," the choreo- grapher says defensively. "I like looking at the Irish midlands."
Though he would object to any use of tidy symbolism, there can be little doubt his building project mirrors his quixotic crusade to establish an internationally renowned company in the desolation otherwise known as Irish modern dance. Ireland has never produced a choreographer of any international renown. There is no national ballet, and just a handful of contemporary companies. "There was nothing I saw here that made me want to become a dancer," he says. "Anyone who was good left and didn't come back. It was a wasteland."
This was a form of dance bondage where the arms are immobile; dancers have been known to stitch down the sleeves of theircostumes to radically strip away expression above the waist. "The whole technique of step dance is down in the feet," says Colin Dunne, former lead dancer with Riverdance, now a student of modern dance. "The more emotional or intelligent parts of the body - your gut, your stomach, your heart, your lungs, your head, your brain, even the face - were just disconnected from the dance form."
In this unfertile ground, modern-dance schools and companies did sporadically and briefly manage to rise up, often disappearing again just as quickly. But the first truly experimental dance-theatre movement didn't come until the 1980s, courtesy of wild-man poet and playwright Tom McIntyre, who (not coincidentally) lives just an hour's drive north of Keegan-Dolan in the even more rugged environment of Co Cavan.
After a trip to the US in the 1970s, where he hung out at La Mama and stumbled on the work of Richard Foreman and the Living Theatre, McIntyre managed to persuade the Abbey to put on his adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh's poem The Great Hunger, in 1983. An uproarious riot of movement, it baffled and outraged Irish audiences with its indulgent experimentalism (at one stage the central character hangs upside-down from a gatepost hollering and cursing for what seemed like an eternity) and its masturbatory references. But what made the work quintessentially Irish was the way it retained the word as the central element.
"The Irish believe in the magic of language," says McIntyre. "We believe that magic can break a bottle, or smash a glass. So if we have the words and we know the words are magic then they must have an effect on the way we move. So, in the theatre I was making, language was pushed to an incantatory level, where it had a direct effect on the body."
In fact, when Keegan-Dolan decided as a teenager to become a dancer, the only dance he had seen was on television. "I remember on the Late Late Show, they were interviewing a Russian ballet dancer and they had a chart of a Russian person's spine and an Irish person's spine, demonstrating how the Irish spine is not right for ballet. And I remember thinking: 'I'm not going to be restricted by my DNA. Just because I'm Irish doesn't mean I can't be a ballet dancer.'"
In the early 1990s, Keegan-Dolan joined the Irish "muscle-drain" and took up a place at the Central School of Ballet in London. On graduation, he worked as a jobbing choreographer with everyone from English National Opera to Peter Hall on the Oedipus plays. He had given up dance and become a bicycle courier when, in 1997, the call came from a regional Irish dance institute in Cork to set up his company, Fabulous Beast. The first work he created for the company was a domestic dance-theatre piece called Sunday Lunch, followed by Fragile, a powerfully visual work involving startling images of corpse- like dancers immersed in bath-tubs of flour and based on the cynic's maxim: "Conception is Sinful, Birth a Punishment, Life Hard Labour, Death Inevitable."
However, it was Giselle, premiered at the Dublin theatre festival in 2003, that displayed the true scope of his talent. The action is transplanted to the fictional Irish small town of Ballyfeeny. For the traditional flouncy, immaculately coiffed peasants, he has substituted disturbingly authentic Irish gombeenmen, transplanted from the same midlands where he spent childhood summers and is now building his home. Employing brutal physical and sexual abuse, much of it directed at his asthmatic Giselle, the choreographer's dark and dangerously anarchic vision transforms the superficial original beyond recognition. "There is still a prince," Keegan-Dolan protests. "OK, so he's not a prince. He's really a Slovakian bisexual line-dancing teacher."
The movement palette is almost primordial in its intensity, as if these simple steps were being discovered for the first time by the inhibited characters. "I'm personally very 'tied up' physically and not good with touching and being too close to people," he says. "That creates all sorts of tension in the body. A lot of the work I do is based on the huge levels of tension you find in Irish people because of that fear of intimacy and fear of sensuality and sexuality."
"I'd just get an idea of a guy sitting in a bath covered in flour or a woman being covered by a bucket of red paint or a section of dialogue. It would come from nowhere but I would just write it all down." Much of this has to do with the practicality of an underfunded art form: "When rehearsals start, I have to get it up there in a matter of weeks."
But most of it can be attributed to the same archetypal verbal impulse that moved other Irish dance-theatre pioneers. "My primary instinct is story-telling," he admits. "It's just part of me. Language is functional. It all has to be functional for movement to be functional - it has to create a character, it has to create a feeling, it has to lend itself to some other bigger thing, it can't be purely movement."
If anything, Keegan-Dolan feels he benefits from the lack of any kind of dance tradition in Ireland. "I'm lucky in that I've no pedigree - I had to work it out myself." In the past year, thanks largely to the ecstatic reviews of Giselle, he has achieved extraordi-nary success. But despite accolades abroad, Keegan-Dolan will continue to be driven by that glorious sense of insecurity that only an Irish dance practitioner can truly appreciate.
"I've already had flirtations with that kind of promise of mega-stardom. It doesn't actually mean anything," he says, as the tour of his midlands hillside comes to an end. "Dead sheep are real. The wind cutting into you half-way up a ladder, that's real. Getting into the rehearsal room for the first time, that's real. All the rest is just bollocks."