“It was a revelation,” she said, curled up on a couch in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her husband, her fingers wrapped around a mug of tea. There was a quietly marveling note in her voice. “I released down into the floor, and I popped up, and I just thought, ‘O.K., I can do that.’ ”  Ms. Butler, 41 (her slender figure and long red hair sometimes make her seem far younger), still gets a contact high from figuring things out in the studio. Her new solo, “Hurry,” which will have its premiere Thursday at Danspace Project, is a layered investigation of movement: what the body can and can’t do, and all of the attendant cultural and personal references that swirl around seemingly small details, like the raising of an arm at this angle as opposed to that.  Of course her life has changed since her early jumping experiments. There has been international fame, courtesy of her three years as the female lead of “Riverdance.” And Ms. Butler now knows the term for that bending of the knees that allowed her to shoot higher in the air: plié.  “At the time I didn’t have the word,” she said. “There’s no plié in Irish dancing.”  But that ballet term is common in the world of contemporary dance, where Ms. Butler now resides. Though “Riverdance” is an association that will never leave her (as she well knows), it is no longer the sum of her identity.  Yet Ms. Butler hasn’t rejected her years of intense dedication to the demanding art form she grew up with on Long Island as a first-generation Irish-American competing in high-level Irish dance championships. Instead of entirely reinventing herself or opting for vanity projects that would be easily available to a famous commercial performer, she has undertaken a much more nuanced second act.  “The way Jean has done this has been very groundbreaking, given her stature as a dancer and her profile,” said Mary Nunan, the director of the University of Limerick’s master’s program in contemporary dance, from which Ms. Butler graduated in 2005. “I see it as setting a kind of standard. It’s not an easy fusion, that’s not how she’s approaching it. There’s more weight and integrity, and a great respect both for the traditional dance form and the territory she can explore simultaneously within contemporary dance.”  In “Hurry” her dancing is marked by both wit and an incredibly luscious rhythmic quality. You can see her Irish pedigree in her body’s striking verticality and angular precision. (Ms. Butler said she felt a kinship with Merce Cunningham, and, watching her, you can imagine what might have been had she encountered his work earlier.) The dance is also spare and fragile. She is frequently still, or close to it, as if testing the air with a small gesture or set of subtle weight shifts. Her focus is inward; there is drama here, not spectacle.  Ms. Butler’s evolution bears a striking resemblance to that of another celebrated “Riverdance” and Limerick graduate, the Irish dancer and choreographer Colin Dunne, with whom she created “Dancing on Dangerous Ground.” (A commercial production that sought to present Irish dance with artistic integrity, that show folded in 2000, only six months into its run, despite receiving critical praise.)  “I wasn’t sure for a long time what to do,” Ms. Butler said. But “I wasn’t willing to let that be my last dancing experience.”  She began her studies at Limerick unsure whether she would continue. But eventually New York’s contemporary dance world began to exert a pull. Since moving to the city in 2006 Ms. Butler has eased in on her own terms, often jumping into activities you would expect a much less experienced artist to do.  She became an intern at Critical Correspondence, an online journal run by the contemporary dance laboratory Movement Research, and danced for the young choreographer Jen Rosenblit at Dance Theater Workshop’s low-key Studio Series. And she took lots of classes, including a workshop with the influential choreographer Tere O’Connor, whose work she became enamored of after attending (several times) his 2007 dance “Rammed Earth.”  She subsequently asked him to choreograph a solo for her. “Day” had its premiere in 2010, receiving critical acclaim.  “Her insight went so beyond genre, so I really trusted that in her and trusted her reason for wanting to do this,” Mr. O’Connor said. “I am impressed by people who don’t just throw away in a grand dismissive gesture the past but include it in the present — not as a reference but as a motor for change.”  For her part Ms. Butler relishes the freedom to develop and question beyond the glare of the spotlight and celebrity. (The choreographer and dancer Jodi Melnick, a close friend, tells an amusingly disconcerting anecdote from a few years ago when she was working in Dublin: “If I was lonely, I would walk to the video store and photograph myself next to” Ms. Butler, “because ‘Riverdance’ was always playing.”)  Ms. Butler said, “I feel like I can really fly under the radar here — and work,” emphasizing the final word with a laugh. “It’s welcoming that way.”  This penchant for hard work was in evidence during a rehearsal in a SoHo loft in December as Ms. Butler plowed through a sequence of delicate steps despite suffering from a very bad cold. She persisted, despite concerned inquiries from Jon Kinzel, a highly regarded choreographer and dancer who is her director for “Hurry.”  “I’d never worked with someone who has such an in-depth history with something so based in a highly formal and stylized work,” Mr. Kinzel said later in a phone interview. “How much could I bring from my experience and share with her?  “That dialogue has involved questioning the idea of making something from nothing — where does material come from? — and investigating her initial impulse for the piece, which had a lot to do with going back into the vernacular of Irish step dancing, deconstructing it, looking at it anew.”  Within such a deconstruction, simply standing on stage — which, Ms. Butler stressed, would never happen in Irish dancing — can acquire a charged significance.  “How do you just be onstage?” she asked. “You’re at your most vulnerable, but also your most powerful. Everything could go wrong. But also something beautiful could happen.”
Jean Butler rose to fame in âRiverdance,â but in her 40s she is unassumedly reinventing herself as a choreographer and performer of contemporary dance.