At the Irish World Academy, one of my tutors shared about answering a casting call for “Irish dancers.” She went to the audition and quickly learned that it was a call for people from Ireland who dance, rather than for those who performed the genre of Irish dance. We chuckled at her story, and admired her courage for persisting and actually winning a role. But the question “what is Irish dance” has persisted. The term “Irish” becomes ambiguous in a context where people who are not from Ireland, nor part of the Irish diaspora practice an art form with a national identifier in its name. What then do we call dance traditions that come from Ireland? Do they have to come from a specific time? Or originate in the country? Is it more about the national context in which it is practiced? What happens when a tradition, that is indigenous to a specific place, travels around the world with the diaspora and is loved by many more? We discussed this in seminars throughout our program. The short answer is: it’s complicated.
Before the formation of An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG – the Irish Dancing Commission) in 1929, dancing traditions in Ireland were referred to as “dancing” or “stepping.” Some places had creative monikers, such as in Leitrim where it might be called “knocking sparks” in reference to the metal on dancers’ boots actually sparking while dancing on the flagstone floors.[1] But with the creation of CLRG, as part of the Conradh na Gaeilge’s (Gaelic League) mission to revitalise the social and cultural life of Ireland, a formal dance genre was created and so too the name “Irish dance.” Thus began a nationalist project which sought to consolidate regional, traditional practices, into a nationally practiced dance form.
Formalising Irish dance in practice meant that they had to establish rules of how to do the dancing correctly. The dancing masters had previously taught an upright posture, with heels off the ground. Joe O’Donovan describes how beginning dancers were consigned to the corner with bits of wood under their heels and stones in their hands to get the elevation and upright posture required. This upright carriage was paired with a relaxed body. At the time, upright was not synonymous to rigid. The movement had to be simultaneously controlled and relaxed.[2] Many stories have emerged about the reasons for this postural choice; my favourite is that the still upper body meant that Irish people could dance without detection when the English Red Coats walked by. These fancies, however, are just that. This upright posture has its roots in the Western European ideals of comportment and bodily control.[3] These values originated among the aristocracy, and were imitated by the middle-class as national identity shifted away from monarchial rule towards elected government. In Ireland, this posture became an enforcement of a bourgeois Catholic ideal onto the rural farmer. The Catholic influence came about in the crossed legs for decorum. Self-control and gentility became the ideals, which were embodied in the upright posture of Irish dance.[4] By this, step-dancing became Irish dancing.
A simple conclusion then would be that dancing as promoted by the CLRG, and subsequently formed Irish dance organizations, are the only legitimate purveyors of Irish dance. The trouble is that the process of choosing which aspects of dancing traditions in Ireland to include in Irish dance was contentious. As they refined traditional céilí dances to suit their vision, the people from the places of origin were not happy. Helen Brennan shares about an encounter in Dundalk where the official Sweets of May version was being taught at a Gaelic League dance class. The older people did not appreciate the “refined” version, and when the young people replied “well, that’s the way Farrelly taught it,” the older generation replied “who the hell do you think taught Farrelly?”[5]
This refining process for group dances was not the only point of contention. Appropriate style for solo dancing also drew ire. Arguments were fought in the Western People newspaper. On 30 July 1904, one correspondent wrote in reference to a recent dance display: “It was not traditional though, it was not Irish. It was pure music-hall dancing… This un-Irish style should not be tolerated. It was buck-jumping. It was fiercely vigorous, but in its execution there is no attempt at gracefulness; no attention to positions, of which the old dancing masters told us there were five, there was little attempt at step – it was simply “jigging” or as sometimes called clog-dancing.”[6] A month later, on 27 August 1904, another correspondent complained of “the ‘spurious dancing’ of the Gaelic League in Dublin as being ‘only a caricature of Irish dancing. The style is music-hall and barrack-room, Lancashire and clog.’”[7] The Gaelic League wanted to purge foreign influence and distill a purely Irish form of dancing, but not everyone agreed on what was suitable. As fights over style were being fought, the Gaelic League created a system that phased out the old dancing masters to create a system of authorised and registered Irish dance teachers, thus distancing the sanctioned practice of Irish dance from the regional traditions held and taught by the dance masters. This is the process of inventing a tradition.
Eric Hobsbawm defined “invented tradition” as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”[8] The Gaelic League’s creation of “Irish dance” did exactly that, it selected elements of dance practice from across Ireland, interwove them with new aspects that were deemed suitable and made a new practice. So, we return to our original question, what is Irish dance? Can the term only be applied to this particular iteration of dance practice? For some, the answer is a resounding yes, and not just from those in the formal Irish dance organizations. There are practitioners of dance forms in Ireland who refer to their practice as step-dancing, or stepping. Some refer to their practice as sean-nós (i.e. old-style), but that term is fraught as well, because it was moniker made to distinguish the practice of percussive dance outside of the registered dancing teachers and the dance masters before them. What we are left with, then, is a wide range of terms, each with its own application, unique to the person’s practice and definitions.
At Kaleidoscope Irish Dance & Movement Studio, we use “old-style Irish dance.” As you know from above, this term is still fraught. I frequently have to define exactly what we do at the studio when dancers and parents enquire. The term we use, in part, is to ensure that people know, broadly speaking, that we offer dance classes tied to traditions that come from Ireland. “Old-style Irish dance” becomes a short hand to help people determine if we offer what they are interested in. That nomenclature continues to be complicated, but in the end, is simpler than saying “percussive step dancing from a variety of regions across Ireland, teaching mostly historical dances, and some new dances created in the late-nineteenth/early twentieth century style.” If you know how to market that, I’d love to hear from you! Ultimately, we are creating our own tradition. Realistically though, that is what happens when something is passed from one person or generation to the next. Tradition is living and breathing. Besides, if you’ve ever compared a feis from the 1920s from one today, you’ll know that they are not the same.[9] And that’s not actually a problem.