SKY One’s Got To Dance winners Prodijig are vowing to launch a new era for Irish dance with their first stage show, Footstorm, whose debut tour thunders into York Barbican on Saturday.

All seven of the groundbreaking troupe’s principal dancers have graduated from Riverdance to fuse traditional Irish dancing with modern urban moves in a show that “breaks new boundaries in dance with never-seen-before steps, a new original score and an innovative story concept”.

Prodijig’s five girls and two girls are choreographed and led by Alan Kenefick, often called the Michael Flatley of his generation, who holds the Guinness world record for tapping speed at 36 taps per second – one faster than Mr Flatley.

Now Alan is looking to stay one step ahead with Footstorm.

“I toured in Riverdance as the lead dancer from 2007 for five years, travelling all around the world and did the lead part when Riverdance was on Strictly Ballroom Dancing, but when you do Riverdance it’s obviously the same show every night, so I was always working on my own ideas too,” says Alan.

“However, Riverdance was such a lucrative show that gave us the chance to go round the globe, so you couldn’t turn your back on that.”

Nevertheless, his own ideas were piling up and when Sky One announced auditions for 2012’s Got To Dance, Alan took the bull by the horns.

“The auditions were the very first time that anyone ever saw anything by Prodijig because Riverdance was a very comfortable living and we didn’t want to create enemies, but eventually we felt what we wanted to do was too exciting not to give it a go,” he says.

“So when I went back to Riverdance after the first show, it just didn’t feel the same, and that was the same for all of us, so the seven of us set up home in Belfast, all living together, and me making up the new material.

“It was a risk, deciding to leave your job and just going for it, but it was exciting too, and that pushed us on to win the series.”

Now Alan and his fellow Prodijig dancers, Ciara McGillan, Andy O’Reilly, Darren Casey, Dane McKiernan, Christina Havlin and Bobby Hodges, are taking his innovative choreography on the road in Footstorm. Eleven new cast members have joined them for a show that combines original dance with specially commissioned original music, co-scored by Classical Brit Award-winning producer Rupert Christie.

“The show is based around an impossible, tender love story that causes conflict between two worlds – one in 2013, the other in the year 2476, where there’s an ecological breakdown,” says Alan, who plays the romantic lead, The Traveller, opposite real-life partner Ciara McGillan.

His inspiration for his mash-up of urban contemporary moves and traditional dance came from the music of Kanye West.

“I’ve always looked up to people like Michael Flatley, but as a child of the 21st century, I used to feel more natural dancing to Kanye West’s music than Riverdance or other forms of Irish dance,” says Alan. “I always danced in my own way; even my dance teacher said I was always creative.”

Yet Alan gave up dancing from the age of 15 to 19.

“I wanted to be a professional rollerblader, when we were all listening to hip-hop, but then when I got back into dance, I brought that into my dancing,” he says.

Although urban music has influenced Alan heavily, the name Prodijig was in no way a nod to the electronic dance group The Prodigy.

“It has nothing to do with them at all,” he says. “I just wanted to make a statement about us being prodigies of Irish dance, doing something new with it and putting it out there in a modern way.

“Just like Michael Flatley took a risk 20 years ago, so did we because kids were waiting for something new and hopefully we’re inspiring them to do something new themselves. It was time for a new show to add to the story of Irish dancing.”

• Prodijig presents Footstorm, York Barbican, Saturday, 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 854 2757 or yorkbarbican.co.uk