"Coming back to The Point in Dublin is something that we all knew in our hearts we were getting excited about." "Nobody wanted to talk about it, but it was an undercurrent within our company." "Everybody could feel it, everybody wanted to come home and test the mettle." "So, bringing it back to The Point, where it all started, was a remarkable, remarkable high, a great achievement, and it was also a huge challenge." "Starting Lord of the Dance there in '96 was a huge, huge time in my life." "It was so emotionally charged and torn and there was so much going on." "If you can imagine the whole world around me telling me it couldn't be done." "I really felt as if I was pushing an elephant uphill, that I had laid out something before me that was seemingly impossible in the eyes of the rest of the world." "I just didn't see that." "I just couldn't understand their thinking." "In my mind it was a done deal." "This was going to be way bigger than what I created before, against all the odds." "And Lord of the Dance became huge and did arenas all over the world." "So, the most important lesson is that you can't listen to all the naysayers." "They're everywhere." "And the more people that told me it couldn't be done, the closer I know that I am to success." "If you just follow what's in your heart and you're willing to work hard for it, then nothing's impossible." "I suppose in my own heart I had something to prove going back in there, back into the lions' den, some 14 and a half years later, and still getting them on their feet." "That's a moment I'll be proud of for the rest of my life." "In the new Lord of the Dance shows, some of the bigger tours that we'd been on have had 1 2 semi-trucks, five buses and a Gulfstream." "And we've got 200,000 watts of lighting up there now, including the ACLs, which are literally aircraft landing lights, which is unheard of in a show like ours." "But we've got, you know, an art form that's ancient, that's brought up to date and into the future with really rock'n'roll lighting and sound, the greatest costumes and theatrical movements, the stage, the sound effects, the special effects that we put in there." "All this brings it to a whole new dimension." "It travels like a rock'n'roll show." "In in eight hours, out in four hours." "It has to." "We've got to be gone to the next city because our venues are 12 to 18000 people." "So we go on to each city, we do one night and we're gone." "The next morning we're in a new city and we have to do it all over again." "Every last dollar that comes on that show is spent on that stage for the audience to see." "It's not wasted on nonsense." "The preparation is done months in advance, years in advance." "Sometimes I'll take a 30-second piece of the show and work on it for eight hours." "I've got sometimes 50 dancers on stage, all dancing as fast as they possibly can, hitting the stage several times a second at exactly the same time." "That's not something you can prepare for on the day or the week before, or even the month before." "It takes months of rehearsal." "I think that's one of the things that makes our show so special." "It's unique." "There is no other show in the world like that." "Remember when you're out there, we didn't come this far to finish second, and we're not going to tonight, OK?" "There can't be a great army without a great general and there can't be a great general without a great army." "Half an hour before the show, 15 minutes, ten minutes, five minutes, you can feel the energy of the audience." "If you close your eyes, you could literally feel the energy of your audience waiting, the anticipation." "It's hard for people to understand the electricity that's in that room when you've got 15 or 18 000 people waiting for the show to start." "It's a remarkable experience to soak up that energy, and for somebody like me who's a performer, waiting backstage to go on," "I feel that." "It lifts me." "I am so proud." "It's like conquering the world, one city at a time, with the greatest dance troupe of all time." "We can't wait for that show to start." "We can't wait for the lights to go down, for the drums to start." "My heart starts beating faster backstage as I'm waiting, and every dancer's the same." "There's a camaraderie there." "Coming back 14 years, five months and three days later to The Point, where it all started, it doesn't get any better than that." "This is going to be the greatest show of my life, tonight."