Michael Flatley

Michael Flatley (born July 16, 1958, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American dancer who transformed traditional Irish dancing into a popular spectator attraction.

Flatley, whose grandmother was a champion Irish dancer, began taking dancing lessons at age 11. His first dancing teacher told him he had started too late to achieve real success, but Flatley persevered. When he was 17, he became the first American to win the all-world championship in Irish dancing. He was also a Golden Gloves boxer and a champion flute player. None of these skills, however, seemed likely to help him earn a living, so he went to work for his father’s contracting business and performed with local Irish dance groups in his spare time.

In the early 1980s Flatley was invited to tour with the traditional Irish musical group the Chieftains. In this context he developed and refined the progressive style of dance that became his trademark. He was soon recognized as a rising talent, and many awards and honours came his way, including a National Heritage fellowship and recognition by the National Endowment for the Arts for his contribution to dance. By the 1990s Flatley’s reputation as a performer with incredible step-dancing skills was firmly established.

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Flatley’s big break came in 1993, when he performed at the Spirit of Mayo, an Irish dance and music festival held in Dublin. After attracting the attention of Ireland’s president, Mary Robinson, and dance-show producers, he was invited to create an intermission show for the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. His creation, Riverdance, captivated the audience. Flatley’s arms flying, he leaped across the stage, transforming Irish dance from a tradition-bound art form that placed a premium on discipline and control into an expressive, buoyant celebration. The jubilant response to the seven-minute performance was overwhelming, and the producers of Riverdance soon expanded it into a feature-length spectacle that thrilled audiences in London and Dublin. Following a bitter creative dispute with the show’s producers, however, Flatley was fired in October 1995. His response was to develop Lord of the Dance, a spectacular Las Vegas-style Celtic dance show that featured Flatley at his most flamboyant.

Though Riverdance had established Flatley as a star, Lord of the Dance turned him into a one-man entertainment empire. Although some critics considered Lord of the Dance to be an overblown exercise in self-indulgence and dance purists cringed at the sequined jackets and tight pants that Flatley favoured, his talent and stage presence were undeniable. The public response was overwhelmingly positive, and by 1997 international sales of his live video, Lord of the Dance, had passed three million copies, and sales of the soundtrack CD that featured the music from the show approached 500,000 copies.

After leaving Lord of the Dance in 1998, Flatley introduced the equally popular show Feet of Flames, which featured more than 100 dancers performing on a four-tiered stage. Flatley toured with different versions of the show through 2001. He continued to work as a creative director on new shows, and he oversaw the Lord of the Dance franchise with its various touring troupes. In 2005 he introduced a two-act dance production, Celtic Tiger, and toured with it for several months, but in November 2006 all future performances were canceled. Over the next several years Flatley performed only occasionally. In 2009, however, he resurrected Feet of Flames, and the following year he returned to Lord of the Dance. In 2015 the latter show premiered on Broadway, with Flatley as the star. The following year he retired from dancing.

In January 2023 it was announced that Flatley had an “aggressive form of cancer” and that he had undergone surgery. He had been treated for melanoma in 2003. His autobiography, Lord of the Dance: My Story, was published in 2006.

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