Literacy Profile: Irish Dance

Jump! Flutter and treble toe up bang bang, treble click switch click spin treble bang!

This is just the first two bars of one of my newest hornpipe steps.  Of course, Irish dance steps always last 8 bars. And of course after you go through the eight bars that started on the right, then you have to repeat the moves by starting with the left. Unless you’re doing a set dance, obviously.

Except not of course and not obviously. Though I have now been Irish dancing for more than half my life, as I started when I was nine and am now twenty-one, I can still remember my days as a beginner when Irish dance was as mystifying to me as most art forms are to those who are not literate in them. Back then, I would only start counting when my teacher cued my to, sort of remembering that I was meant to start my steps after I had counted to 8. But I learned quickly enough, because there was nothing I had ever wanted to learn more than Irish dance. 

As a kid going to Catholic school in Rhode Island I had a lot of classmates who, like myself, had families who had come to America from Ireland at some point in the not-too-distant past. For these classmates, the sport of choice was Irish dance. I was so envious of these kids who got to perform in front of the whole school in the cafeteria on St. Patrick’s Day, the girls with their hair curled and their Tara brooches pinning their silky capes to the back of their dresses, and after performing for us, would get to ditch school for the day to dance in other places around the state. I loved the music, I loved the steps, I loved the idea, even at that young age, that I had probably had family members who had done these same sort of dances. Eventually my mom finally took me to my first beginner class in a VFW hall and there’s been no looking back since.

Now that I am not just a performing, competitive Irish dancer, but a teacher as well, I have become so much more aware of how knowledge is required in Irish dance and how much incidental knowledge is acquired as well. To simply be able to dance, I had to learn what each move was called by my current dance teachers. When I switched dance schools in college, getting over “language barrier” was a struggle in and of itself, but there was some overlap as the teachers I had as children and the teachers of my current studio had been trained by the same teacher as children. But the same translations would have to occur again whenever I attended workshops or when I went to Ireland for a semester in Ireland. In Ireland, a treble jig is a waltz, a treble is a rally, hard shoes are heavies, ghillies are lights. Thankfully, some things always stay the same, such as the music: I can tell a slip jig (which is in 9/8^th time) from a reel (4/4 time) after two bars. Traditional set dances are nearly identical through the world, as are ceili dances, which is a type of social dancing.

As I mentioned above, lots of incidental knowledge comes with being an Irish dancer. Because of Irish dance, I’ve learned Irish history, I know a handful of Irish words, I know hairspray makes the bottoms of your shoes kind of sticky when you might be dancing on a slippery floor. I've learned you should turn-out from your hips, not your knees and even when you're way too tired to stretch you really are gonna regret it if you don't. I’ve learned teamwork and that when you've committed to something, that's the end of the story. I’ve learned that some kids learn steps better when they’re broken down, other kids need to just do the step to speed over and over until it all comes together. I’ve learned that usually the wildest kid will become a model student if you give them a “special” job that you think only they can do. Most importantly I think I’ve learned that learning, although sometimes it is easy, can be really hard. It can hurt. It can feel impossible. But with hard work, and sometimes that means working ten times harder than anyone else in your class to just be able to do half of what they can do, nearly nothing is impossible.  I’ve tried to express that to my students, who mostly might be too young to understand right now, and to carry that over into all aspects of my life. Truly, Irish dance has taught me “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” 

Except usually it’s like “try, try, try, try even harder, and then try again.” But the success that comes at the end of hours and months of practice has never not been worth it.