So Rian is a completely different beast to previous work and, if not more positive in outlook, then more realistic, he says, describing making it as "a transformative experience towards light and joy".
"Both Giselle and Rian are perfectly valid expressions of being an Irish artist," he adds. "But there has been a changing perspective of all facets."
And, in further explanation, "We have winter, summer, day and night - our capacity for the light is only fully understood in contrast to the dark."
Giselle was made in 2003, Rian eight years later. "Eight years of searching and learning how to see more clearly," he says. "And I had children."
Keegan-Dolan and his wife, Fabulous Beast dancer Rachel Poirier, welcomed a son four and a half years ago and a daughter two years later, just as rehearsals for Rian began.
"Marathon man [O Maonlai] played for hours and we danced for hours," Keegan-Dolan says of the first period of the work's creation.
Anything that could be remembered from that process was later deemed to have some quality, and was consolidated and quirkily labelled (Kicking the Sleeping Hare, Soft Boxerand Thank God for Yoga) until 108 movements, all with a story, depth and meaning, remained. So, while Rian might seem like a party in parts, it is a potent party and a powerful piece.
"Some of it actually came from quite a sad place. Some of the slower songs are full of yearning, sadness, remembering. There were lots of tears shed in the making. But sadness and joy only exist in relationship to one another."
Keegan-Dolan has had a serious 13-year relationship with yoga, studying with well-known teacher Shandor Remete "who taught me about the energetic map of the body and how that energy works".
All his dance is made from that aspect, he says, and to elicit the power of the performers' natural physicality. In his essay The Body he writes: "Most actors are just talking heads and most dancers are not even headless bodies as many of them have had the sense and power of their own physicality taken from them by the pursuit of an external manifestation of perfection."
He also writes: "I work with sensation and energy. How I feel when I visualise a person ... where does tension manifest ... in the throat, the neck, the abdomen, the pelvis?
"I see and then feel my way around the characters who will eventually occupy the landscape of the piece. These characters then become the building blocks of our productions."
The "session" structure of Rian allows the characters of its eight dancers and five musicians, who interchange roles at times, to manifest an expressive, cultural hybrid. Two of the dancers have African origins and O Maonlai has spent a lot of time in Mali, so some of the show beats to an African rhythm.
But its backbone is Irish music, and an ancient form of Irish dancing that leapt wild and free, long before the commercialised, arms-clamped-to-the sides version became popular, fused with a contemporary idiom.
"What takes us most deeply to the past, to who we are, is music listened to with attention," says Keegan-Dolan. "Connecting with the past brings up sadness - and in this part of the world we have had a lot of trouble.
"Ireland might have had a terrible past but I am now more aware that most countries have had difficulties and suffering in their pasts.
"And we are all still here - living and dancing and singing. Now, that's a party!"
New Zealand Festival
What: Rian
Where and when: St James Theatre, Wellington, March 12-1
More info: http://festival.co.nz/rian/
