Gotta Dance

By Eric Celeste

Reprinted from SW Airline’s Spirit Magazine August 1997 Issue

Michael Flatley, the world’s most recognized dancer, was coming down with a bad case of déjà vu. His new Celtic-music pop-dance extravaganza, Lord of the Dance, was finishing its date in Manchester, England, and set to open four days later in London. Flatley, the show’s producer, star, choreographer, and raison d’etre, arrives late to the Manchester performance. He hurries into his buck-Rogers-goes-ballet stage costume and prepares for his entrance. Back-lit, with an Irish-music score as background, Flatley excites the crowd with his sensual, energetic, high-stepping dance, performed with the glam trappings and high style that bespeaks a man whose feet hold a world record.

Ten seconds in, though, his dance majesty is made mortal: Flatley tears a calf muscle, proving even Lords need to warm up. "I was devastated," says Flatley, speaking during a rare break in Lord’s U.S. tour. It’s been a long day of interviews, but Flatley is a well-oiled robopromoter: His spirit never flags, he punctuates every point with hyperbole, and he continually underscores the obstacles he has overcome to become someone worthy of such media attention.

"We all didn’t know what was going to happen," he says. "We brought in physiotherapists from three different companies. The first guy said, ‘It will be six weeks before you’ll be back dancing’; the second guy said four to six weeks. The last guy said he wouldn’t put a time limit on it. I liked his answer best.

"We strapped me from my foot all the way up to my thigh. I took painkillers. I focused my energy on that leg every day. And we opened four days later in the Coliseum in London. We had to. I would have lost everything. If that show stops there [in Manchester], I would have been out a million-and-a-half pounds."

More than that, Flatley would have been denied his retribution. In October 1995, on the eve of a dance show’s London opening, Flatley experienced a similar (if figurative) tear: Less than twenty-four hours before the London opening of the now-legendary dance show Riverdance, a lawyer for the show’s producers called Flatley to tell him he had been let go for refusing to relinquish his choreographic copyright. (Through a spokeswoman, officials with Riverdance declined to be interviewed for this story.) It was shocking because Riverdance star Flatley, along with female co-lead, Jean butler, had been instrumental in the show’s monstrous popularity across the pond. He had been considered the primary reason the once-stodgy style of Irish dancing (arms kept tight to the side, back erect, feet clogging away) was now considered hip and sexy.

Although his acrimonious contract negotiations had been reported in the British press, Flatley insists he was stunned to be sacked from the show. The star was making a hefty salary (about $75,000 a week) and had just signed a lease on a house. He says it was one of only two times he has cried as an adult.

"I’m an incredibly driven individual," he says matter-of-factly. "I decided I had to overcome the disappointment. I felt that I was wronged in the Riverdance situation. And the way to prove they were wrong was to do another show."

And do one he has. As retribution, Lord of the Dance has proven very successful. It has embarked on the second leg of its U.S. tour, after sold-out runs in several countries to increasingly larger crowds (10,000- to 15,000-seat arenas, as opposed to Riverdance’s smaller venues). It sold 1.5 million videotapes in less than twelve weeks in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand (compared to one million in one year for Riverdance). And although some stories have pointed out the show’s negative reviews, an Internet search shows that many of the notices for the show have ranged from respectful to gushing.

Still, not everyone has rooted for Flatley’s success. He has been portrayed in the press as a megalomaniac. He’s been involved in a long dispute with Riverdance over royalties and choreography credit. His show has been criticized — as Riverdance was — for being a Las Vegas bastardization of a subtle Irish dance form. And he’s something of a playboy.

None of that seems to faze Flatley; he just high-steps over any negative talk, preferring to focus on what he has overcome, whether in his time growing up or putting together his current pop-dance spectacle. "It was incredibly difficult to pull Lord of the Dance together," he says. Of course it was, but Flatley does not seem convinced an interviewer could quite understand the depth of his sacrifice.

"I guess you’d just have to see it from my shoes."

There is no getting around it: Michael Flatley has a huge ego, which is, of course, one of the reasons he is successful. He is not satisfied with merely being considered one of the best dancers of his generation. He is not satisfied with being the fastest tapper alive — his world record is twenty-eight taps per second — because, well, he can tap even faster if he wanted to, he says. He wants to be a world-class star, known as much for his face as his leaps. He wants to be heir to the celebrity throne of Michael Jackson. If it did not also suggest the other big-name Michael, you could see him going for the moniker Air Flatley.

"I think it’s important that we bring the focus back to dance," says Flatley, thirty-nine. "I believe that pop culture can be dance. It doesn’t have to be a singer or a rock star. I think it can compete on the world stage. And that’s [really] important to me."

As is his place in dance’s ascension. Flatley, recently filed for divorce from his wife of eleven years, told an interviewer that he was not concerned about approaching middle age without having a family with which to share his success. "Long after I’m gone," he says, "people aren’t going to be saying, [in thick Irish accent] ‘Now wasn’t that nice that he had a lovely family life?’"

That would not be enough. The philosophers say man is concerned with one of the two things he can leave behind: his offspring or his works. Being remembered for the latter is obviously more important to Flatley. Such comments feed into the perception of Flatley as a star who is too self-absorbed.

It’s a perception with which some who have worked with him agree. He’s focused on one thing, and that’s himself," his former publicist, Mark Borkowski, told Time. "I can’t be at his beck and call every moment of the day." The magazine also reported that Flatley earlier this year fired his manager, John Reid, because he wasn’t spending enough time pushing Flatley’s film-development deals.

Indeed, Flatley’s preoccupation with landing a movie deal is well documented in interviews from the past year. Flatley says a feature film is important because it is one more way to bring his escapist, joyful dance to the audiences who love it. In fact, he says his success comes because he places his audience’s interest before his own.

"The way I direct is that I look from the audience’s point of view," he explains. "I ask, ‘What are the people out there expecting to see, what are they hoping to see, and how can we go past it?’ That’s what you have to do. You have to constantly shock and surprise them with something more than they were expecting. It’s the key to life. Always give more than is expected, and you’ll get more than you’re expecting."

Which seems to be true for the critics. While some such as London’s Daily Telegraph writer Ismene Brown said Lord of the Dance was "embarrassing," many others have offered grudging praise for its mix of traditional Irish forms and Vegas-style glitz. "For all the rampant narcissism at the heart of Lord of the Dance," says Keith Watson of The Guardian in London, "there’s no escaping the fact that Flatley has produced an exhilarating extravaganza that starts out as Riverdance part two but quickly develops a persuasive character of its own."

Clive Barnes, of Dance magazine and the New York Post, is an unabashed Flatley enthusiast. He called Lord of the Dance "a fascinating, rewarding, and above all entertaining new move in the fast-moving direction of pop dance." Of Flatley’s flashy Celtic-born, flamenco-influenced style, Barnes says, "Flatley … has given it a sheer pop force that few would have guessed or dreamed of. Flatley’s enthusiasm, gusto and guts — not to mention his show-biz flair and expertise — are, in any case, irresistible."

Audiences have agreed. Not only have sales been tremendous, but the audience’s intensity has been noted even by critics of the show.

"The reception has been incredible," Flatley says. "We thought we couldn’t do better than Ireland. Then we went to England, and it got better. Then we went to Australia, and it got better. But I have to say it’s been the best in America.

"I don’t know why it’s so popular so fast. I just think that it’s high-energy. It’s in an industry that desperately needed that sort of thing. It’s kind of in the middle. It’s not really theater, and yet it is. It’s not really a rock show, and yet it is. It’s the ancient dance, and it’s combined with futuristic lighting and sound and the upper-body movement. We went back in time, and we brought it into the future."

The impetus for creating Lord of the Dance may have been his schism with Riverdance, but Flatley says he’d pictured a fusion of dance and theater years before.

It’s been a dream of mine all my life to do it. I’ve always had the picture of how to do it in my head. Of course, everyone tells you that it can’t be done. Everyone says no, no, no. And it’s only when you get to the point where you believe in yourself enough that you can do it. You’re at the top of the mountain, and you don’t know if you can fly, but you do."

Flatley’s flight did not begin where he was born, in Chicago, but in Ireland. It did not begin with his working-class father, a construction worker born in County Sligo, Ireland; it didn’t begin with his mother, from County Carlow. It began with his grandmother, Hannah Ryan, who was herself an Irish step-dance champion.

He had the genes, then, but did not start as most prodigies do; Flatley did not take up formal Irish step lessons until the age of eleven, considered too old to begin if you’re going to make a career of jigging.

"Everyone in the world will tell you, ‘No, it can’t be done,’" he says, recalling his initial dejection. "Even my closest friends will say it can’t be done, it can’t be done. Every time I hear that, I know I’m close to success."

To compensate, he put in hours of step training in his parents’ garage. Because his motor has always run at a shockingly high rpm, he also became adept at a few other endeavors: He took up boxing ("boxing and dance go very well together"), winning a Chicago tournament; he considers himself a chess master and a concert-level flautist (he is a past winner of the World Irish Flute Championship); his IQ is high enough to qualify for MENSA membership; he was the youngest recipient of a U.S. National Heritage Fellowship; he became the first American to win the All world Championship in Irish dancing.

Then he rocked. Literally, spending ten years touring with the Irish fold band The Chieftains.

"That was my training ground," he says. "They were so much fun. Going out performing every night in different cities, testing against the audiences, was a great way to find what worked. Doing that for ten years, it became easy to know what would work. So when I went to Ireland to do Riverdance, it was a piece of cake because I knew what I was doing."

Not that anyone knew Riverdance would be as successful as it proved to be. It began inauspiciously, as intermission entertainment during the annual (and oft-ridiculed) Eurovision Song Contest — the same contest that was once won by a then-unknown Swedish group ABBA. After the April 1994 broadcast, the musical single from the Riverdance appearance was on the top of the Irish charts for eighteen weeks.

The producers decided to develop it into a full stage show to capitalize on its obvious popularity. Flatley, his Chieftains dancing partner, Jean Butler, and assorted composers and producers came up with the entire Riverdance show.

Riverdance, at two hours long, opened nearly a year later, in February 1995, to ecstatic fans in Dublin’s Point Theatre. The show incorporated flamenco and eastern European dance influences, but Flatley and Butler’s hard-shoe Irish dancing was its most-recognized — and, by Celtic purists, most criticized — element.

Shortly before opening that October in London, the gossip columns began reporting on backstage rifts: Butler didn’t like the attention Flatley was getting, they reported, and Flatley didn’t think he was getting enough attention from the show’s producers. After his last-minute firing, Flatley went about plotting his rebirth in what would become Lord of the Dance. First, he says, he had to decide what form it would take.

"I had to design the entire show in my head," he says. I knew I was going to have to finance it. … I paid for it myself. But once I had auditions, got my troupe, I didn’t have the luxury of waiting a couple of weeks while I figured out what we were going to do. I had to get the show off and running."

Flatley says he worked best in old, beat-up studios, plotting out his solos and the rest of the dance numbers in front of large mirrors. (Except for one number, "Hell’s Kitchen," which he choreographed in the dark.) Then he auditioned to find his forty-member troupe. Remarkably, none of the dancers he chose had ever danced professionally. "The beauty of that was that I could take people who didn’t have bad habits, or different habits, and help them."

The work with other dancers was almost therapeutic for Flatley. The sense of fulfillment it gave him helped the pain of his separation with Riverdance ebb away.

"We’ve had a lot of tough times along the way, incredibly difficult moments," he says. "You just have to fight through it because you never know how it’s going to come out in the big picture. Like with Riverdance. They wanted to do the 2,000-seat arenas with more generic show, and not do the big arenas, which has always been my dream. So I was forced into a situation, but I got to meet all these fabulous people and do the show I wanted in the end. Every day, something else has to be overcome. But you know that going in."

Flatley also knows it can’t go on forever. He got a late start on this fame thing, and at his age he says he can count on only ten more years or so of dancing. But right now he’s enjoying the notoriety, the jazz of the show. He’s thinking bout slowing down a bit, putting an end to the living-in-hotels life, maybe get homes in New York and Ireland. But right now he’s too busy.

Besides, he’s not yet as popular as he wants to be — as Jacko or Jordan. Even after appearing this year on the Oscars, not everyone knew his name. In Cleveland, while eating at a restaurant, an elderly Chinese man approached Flatley. He couldn’t speak English, but he knew Flatley was famous, that maybe he was a dancer, had legs insured for twenty-five million pounds, was starring in the largest pop-dance spectacle in history. He pointed at him and simply said, "Oscar!"

Flatley laughs when he tells the story. But he actually takes a lesson from it. "It means I’ve gotta do more work, get the word out. It means I gotta dance some more."

Eric Celeste is the editor in chief of Dallas/Fort Worth Lifestyle magazine.

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