The ebullient Irish choreographer jumps up from the sidelines in his South London rehearsal studio. “Let’s talk about dog food,” he tells the dancers. Dog food? I’ve never heard that in a dance rehearsal before, but then this isn’t exactly an average rehearsal. For one thing, the dancers are wearing dog masks on their heads; for another, they are down on all fours, sniffing and snorting like canines.

Dogs and Stravinsky might not be a natural pairing, but in the febrile creative mind of Michael Keegan-Dolan anything is possible. He has built a career out of daring to be different, so when English National Opera decided it wanted a radical rethink of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (to share a bill with a new Duke Bluebeard’s Castle), Keegan-Dolan seemed a logical choice. Even with the man-dogs.

By now the dialogue about canine chow has me in stitches; his dancers, members of his Fabulous Beast company, are such clever wordsmiths. But as wonderful as it is, this improvised comedy routine is only a means to an end. What’s unfolding in front of my eyes is a kind of creative therapy workshop designed to push the dancers beyond their comfort zone.

“Asking them to speak and sing, to do something they are not good at, turns them into children,” Keegan-Dolan says. “Their personality recedes and their essence comes forward. I’m attempting to get people to move in that space, the space of innocence and simplicity. I always pay a great deal of attention to the internal world of the dancer; the more human a dancer is, the more exciting for the viewer.”

As must be obvious by now, he represents the other side of the Irish dance phenomenon, a million miles from the rigid aesthetic and bland mystical utterances of Riverdance. Keegan-Dolan has a talent that is savage and funny, anarchic and wantonly physical. Fabulous Beast shows are famous for their exuberant mix of speech, song, clowning and dance.

His Giselle turned the male lead into a bisexual line-dance teacher; The Flowerbed brought the warring intransigence of Romeo and Juliet to a suburban garden. The Bull, based on one of the great epics of Irish literature, told of a bloody tribal war over the ownership of a prized bull. In his hands, the story became a bruising satire of consumerist greed in the land of the Celtic Tiger (this was before the recession) and it won him few friends at home.

That production took place on ten tonnes of Irish peat moss. The Rite of Spring is similarly grounded in the earth, and you get the feeling that Keegan-Dolan’s inspiration is rooted in the very soil of his homeland. It’s the reason that he returned to Ireland in 2004 after more than a decade in London; presumably it’s the reason he has relocated to a converted dairy farm “in the middle of a bog”, about 90 minutes from Dublin. “I absolutely love where I’m from,” he says.

He was born in Dublin 40 years ago, but left as a young man to pursue dance studies in London. After graduation, he got work as a jobbing choreographer in opera and theatre. “In the 1990s everyone in London was walking around with shaved heads and doing non-narrative abstract dance. I never felt like I fit.” His career took off only when he founded his Irish-based company, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, in 1997.

In The Rite of Spring he moves away from the multidisciplinary approach of recent productions. “There is no text, no song; I’m going back to my dance roots. My Rite has a magical-realist quality that permits me to break the rules of narrative logic. It’s a ritual, after all, and rituals can be very strange.”

The original ballet, which caused a sensation in 1913 when the Ballets Russes performed it in Paris, depicted a primitive Russian tribe sacrificing a chosen maiden to ensure the arrival of spring. Keegan-Dolan may not be following the original scenario (certainly the man-dogs see to that) but he will have a victim. “She’s an unmarried woman and that character in a certain community has a kind of power. There’s a question hanging over her because she doesn’t fit into the community’s expectations.”

Part of the allure of the ENO project was the chance to have a 100-piece orchestra playing the Stravinsky score. “I have a huge respect for music which is maybe not apparent in my work, but I have worked a lot in opera, I have worked with many conductors and orchestras, so I’m primed and ready to go. And what I’m most interested in is the line where music and dance meet; I’m excited to make that line not rigid, to make it bend in every way I can.”

Working on The Rite of Spring has reinvigorated Keegan-Dolan’s passion for the art form. “I’ve realised that I absolutely adore dance, more than theatre, more than song. And not having a whole lot of it in my work has made me appreciate it more. This time it’s much more about steps.”

Since his return to Ireland he has seen the dance landscape there change. “When I used to tell people I was a dancer, they asked me if I was like Riverdance; now it’s all Strictly Come Dancing. I haven’t found a way to describe what I do because we don’t have a dance legacy in Ireland. I often wonder what neurons fire in people’s brains when you say you are a dancer. Do they think you are a cabaret dancer or a lap dancer?”

Yet despite what Keegan-Dolan calls “the invisible concrete wall between head and body” in Ireland, the country is uniquely placed to appreciate dance. “The Irish have a propensity for magic. I’m not talking about hocus pocus and Paul Daniels. Magic is what you can’t see, what you can’t quantify, and dance is part of it, it can make magic happen. I’m exploring this connection, but I’m only scratching the surface of the wild creative energy that’s in Ireland.”

The Rite of Spring opens at the London Coliseum, WC2 (www.eno.org; 0871 9110200), on Nov 6

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