Let's celebrate James Keegan's final encore as the Lord of the Dance!
We need to talk about James. This man's career as an Irish dancer is legendary. For the technical purists out there, James has won enough competition trophies to open up a gift shop. At the turn of the millennium 22 years ago, James won every major title that could be achieved competitively in Irish dancing. All of them. In a single year.
Becoming a world champion of Irish dancing is brutally difficult; becoming a Grand Slam champion is virtually impossible. So that's sorted. The competition anoraks can sit down.
Next: getting into Team Lord is unbelievably hard. Staying in it is even harder. This is a billion-dollar show which features an extremely accelerated high-impact form of dancing. Remember, Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance is 100% Irish dancing; there are no other cultural dance forms in the show, and the average backline dancer can expect to be in at least eight numbers per night. Competition dancers train to flawlessly execute two minutes; show dancers train to flawlessly execute two hours. Now add in the rigors of touring, and the harsh reality is that literally only the top fraction of the top one percentile even qualify to audition -- with a new crop of hungry youngsters every year nipping at your heels.
Now let's up the ante: you're promoted to a lead role. And not just any lead role: you're now the Lord of the Dance.
Wearing that title belt means something. It means that Michael Flatley himself expects you to go out onstage and do at least as good a job as he did, because you have to win over an audience that has Flatley hardcoded in their hearts, and in order for his show to keep selling tickets with him permanently retired, you need to win that audience over. Every. Single. Night.
Let's push the envelope further. James Keegan, specifically, faced a unique challenge: he was the first person other than Michael to star as the Lord of the Dance in a commercial video release. (2014's Dangerous Games.)
This opens up a whole new level of difficulty. Being a stage star and being a film star are two wildly different skill sets; you can watch a great stage performance which, for whatever reason (usually the editing), just feels flat and lifeless on film. A big part of Michael Flatley's success was that he is the exceptionally rare performer who can do both simultaneously, looking good on camera whilst performing live -- and James Keegan has that same ability.
Lord of the Dance, unlike Michael's first show, is designed as a star vehicle: you buy a ticket to LOTD to see the greatest Irish dancers in the world shine. That's how it's able to sell out stadiums 26 years after it was created, and why audiences go wild for it even to this day. It's not a polite evening of theatre for ivory-tower pseudointellectuals; it's a rock concert, and people buy a ticket because to Lord of the Dance because they want to get ROCKED.
James Keegan is an Irish dance rockstar.
And he's done it for 19 years.
Think about that. There are professional Irish dancers on this planet right now who literally didn't exist when James Keegan first won the title belt. You simply cannot imagine the level of work ethic required to stay at the top of the game for this long.
Which brings us to today. Today, James Keegan is Michael Flatley's right-hand man: the creative manager of Lord of the Dance. He has nothing left to prove. He actually retired from stage performing back at the end of 2020, after the Impossible Tour. But as the show's 25th anniversary tour came to his hometown of Manchester, James came out of retirement for one final performance in front of his hometown crowd -- and we caught the whole thing on camera.
It wasn't a pre-planned shoot. What you see here isn't some carefully-orchestrated big-budget affair with computer-controlled camera movements and footage airbrushed to soulless perfection. We rushed to pull together cameras only a few hours before showtime. Dark Lord Alasdair Spencer was one of the cameramen. Crew members pitched in with two of the cameras. We put a GoPro on Dark Lord Connor Smyth. There's even footage from our backstage livestream added to this mix. And yet, somehow, this video just works. Lord of the Dance seems to be at its best when it's a little rough around the edges, when it captures that explosive you-had-to-be-there lightning in a bottle, and that's what this video gives you: an honest-to-God one-night-only experience.
And the center of that experience? The greatest performance of James Keegan's life. There's a certain old-school energy here that all LOTD fans, especially classic fans, are going to love.
Though the UK tour of LOTD25 is concluded, it saved its best for last. This is the final encore of one of the greats. This is James Keegan cutting loose.
Pay attention, kids: this is how you do it.
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