DUBLIN — A man, wearing a black hoodie, hunched over a cigarette, stares blankly into space. He is unemployed and chronically depressed, and soon he takes a shotgun — a birthday present from his mother — and walks down to the lake to kill himself. But there he encounters a winged woman, and he falls in love. Will he be saved? Will she?

This is Michael Keegan-Dolan’s “Swan Lake/Loch na hEala,” which opens the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday. When the piece begins, with a man tethered to a concrete block, bleating like a goat, it’s hard to imagine what any of this could have to do with Tchaikovsky, castles, swans in white tutus and the wicked magicians who enslave them.

But when the tethered man (the actor Mikel Murfi) is unbound, dressed and seated, he begins to speak, weaving a tale of sadness, displacement, love, evil and redemption that reinvents “Swan Lake” as a story of contemporary Ireland, a land where myth and mundanity consort with ease.

Mr. Keegan-Dolan, an Irish choreographer who has won considerable repute over the last decade, sets out his story with economy. It unfolds through Mr. Murfi’s narration, as he takes on the personas of a priest, a corrupt local politician and a policeman. The prince of this “Swan Lake” is Jimmy; his swan queen, Finola, a young woman who has been sexually abused by a priest, then turned — along with her three sisters — into a bird so that she cannot tell his secret.