When I first started learning old-style Irish step dancing, I got quite excited because it integrated my love of history with my love of dancing. Unlike the sixteenth-century Collège de Guyenne that I studied for my PhD, old-style Irish dance offered so many opportunities and sources to connect with its history and practice.
For Samhain, it has been my tradition to set goals for new steps to learn over the course of the year. The aim is to learn one per month. For this year, however, I am scaling it back to six steps, because I am finally going to bring steps out of the archives.
The Moynihan Manuscript will be my first challenge. The manuscript derives from written notes based on an interview with Cork Dance Master, James Moynihan in 1938. The original document was hand-written, in two parts, of which only one seems to have survived. The typed version from 1962 was donated to the Cullinane Archive Collection held at the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin.[1]
The typed manuscript is seventeen pages long and contains extracts of Moynihan’s thoughts and ideas about Irish dancing. Eileen Curran typed the notes in 1962. Curran was not involved in dance, but was an elocution teacher. She taught at ‘The Loft’ which specialised in youth and cultural activities, including elocution, singing, Irish dance, and Shakespearean productions.[2] Father O’Flynn was the founder of ‘The Loft, and the original 1938 interview was to honour his work and perpetuate his memory.
Moynihan was in declining health at the time the interview took place. This is an unfortunate reality in the realm of dance preservation – practitioners wait until it’s almost too late to share their knowledge. John Cullinane recounts the story of how Moynihan, on his deathbed, regretted not sharing his single jig with Cormac O’Keefe. When he was still able to dance, he had refused to do so because O’Keefe was from the wrong side of Cork City.[3] During his 1938 interview, Moynihan would enthusiastically describe a dance, but his physical abilities were unable to match the enthusiasm, so he was not in a position to perform demonstrations.[4] It is important to note that dance steps were not composed very often, and only done by the dancing masters, so the steps recorded in the Moynihan manuscript represent dances that had an established history in Cork.
The names of the six steps preserved in the manuscript are “Toe in the Fire,” “The Springing Reel,” “The Flying Reel,” “The Rocking Reel,” “The Circling Reel,” and “The Back-to-Back Reel.” A seventh step was noted in a list, but the details of the step, unfortunately, are not preserved in the manuscript. Presumably this is because some of the original notes are lost. Cullinane refers to “The Rattler” in his blog post about the manuscript, but only in with respect to its previous popularity and eventual decline. It is a step that Cullinane danced in his youth.
Moynihan indicates that the Flying Reel had been danced for as many as 75 years to that point, so likely composed in 1863. The Rocking Reel and the Back-to-Back Reel are both noted as being popular in the 1880s.[5] Moynihan selected these seven steps “because of their distinctive traditional features and peculiarities as being best calculated to demonstrate the pattern of the best traditional steps.”[6] Some of these dances also represent a style of reels from the post-Famine, but pre-Gaelic League period, so there are interesting threads to examine in that regard as well.
For my own goals, I start transcribing Moynihan’s step descriptions of the Back-to-Back reel. I will use the video versions provided in John Cullinane’s Traditional Cork Steps and Sets[7] and Joe O’Donovan’s Old Style Traditional Irish Step Dancing, 1700-1930[8] as a type of “Rosetta stone” to try and understand the movement in practice. By using these videos as guides, I will hopefully be able to create a kind of dictionary of movements by which to understand and embody the other five steps.
Follow along with me as I venture into the realm of archival steps!
If learning dances from the Cork tradition of old-style Irish step dancing sounds like your kind of fun, consider my new class: Revel in Reels a 31-day Irish dance program designed to launch the new year with confidence, clarity, and joy!
Step in and start 2024 with rhythm!