Dancer Interviews:

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Transmitting Irish dance requires the use of language, too, including the invocation of codified steps. And we have something non-percussive forms don’t: the aid of rhythm, the syntax produced through footfalls. Entire sequences of Irish dance can be conveyed through sound alone. We train our ears as much as our bodies to listen to the cadence, rhythm, and diction of our steps.

Irish dance, as I experienced it in my ten years of training and competing, exists in a particular relationship to language. It has its own lexicon—rife with regionalisms, slang, nonsense words, and onomatopoeia—situated within a body of literature: the documented forms and structures of ceili dances and traditional sets danced to ancient tunes we know and love.

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Irish dance gave me access to my Irish culture. While my father’s Quebecois side is deeply embodied through song, story, and tradition, my connection to my Irish heritage via my mother is far less traced and far less present in my family. I was not, in other words, placed into an Irish dance class in the church basement by my family like some of the Boston-Irish kids I trained with and competed against throughout New England. Though I envied this cultural alignment, I probably would have quit had that been my reality. I found this form on my own. It also introduced me to the curvaceous, musical language of Gaelic. I remember the elation I felt at learning the proper pronunciation and spelling of feiseanna and Oireachtas and ceili, and, at the World Championships, listening in wonder as the announcers introduced dancers onstage in Gaelic, time-consuming as it was—those numbers get long!

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I usually say that I began dancing after seeing Riverdance, but the story is a bit more meandering than that. I took my first Irish dance class when I was eight, inspired, in part, by a linguistic confusion around dance forms and their names. I had been vaguely aware of the form in the way many Americans who had televisions in the late nineties and early-aughts were: the omnipresence of Riverdance, advertised on PBS between Bill Nye and Mister Rogers. I had some idea that there existed a kind of percussive dance beyond tap, which I knew from marveling at Savion Glover on TV. But, practically, dance existed in the territory of local dance studios near where I grew up: ballet, jazz, tap, sometimes hip-hop. 

In a human-interest news story on TV, I watched a group of kids demonstrate their clogging steps to boisterous fiddle music. Something about it sparked me—the sound of their shoes on the floor, the dancers’ speed and agility. I knew already that I loved to run, to move fast, but the team-sportiness of soccer hadn’t interested me. My mother and I searched “clogging lessons” online, but as we lived in suburban-rural New Hampshire and not Appalachia we came up short. We did, though, find an Irish dance school offering lessons thirty minutes away. I signed up, went to my first class, and began my now twenty-four year life as a dancer.

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“What kind of dance?” 

“Irish dance.”

 “Oh, like Riverdance-ing?”

As a child—to adults and other children, alike—I would explain, as best I could, that the two words, Irish and dance, would suffice. But somehow, like a game of telephone, it morphed—“Irish tap” or “Irish clogging”, “step dancing” or “step.”

It's not that I wasn’t thrilled to have a cultural reference point in Riverdance. I was a huge fan. But imagine someone saying, “Oh, like Beethoven’s Fifth­-ing?” if you told them you were taking violin lessons.  

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In college I studied improvisation with Penny Campbell, informed by her work with dancer Judith Dunn and trumpeter Bill Dixon. Dunn and Dixon pioneered an approach to improvisation in which dance and music held equal weight: dance did not simply illustrate musical phrasing, and music did not solely accompany or support movement. Discovering this work electrified me, completely upending my understanding of performing and making dances. We worked as an ensemble—dancers, musicians, lighting designer—practicing compositional forms and structures so that, onstage, we could perform with no choreography or score, calling on the skills we’d honed through rigorous, consistent practice.

Our first ground rule as an ensemble was to refer to what we did as improvisation, not improv, as a way to lend respect to the form—to its roots in the tenets of jazz and Black music and to its legitimacy as a form of performance. Language matters.

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Point, point, hop-back two three

Point, point, hop-back two three

Point hop back,

point hop back,

point, point hop back two three.

This was the first step, a reel, that I learned in that first Irish dance class. In looking back I think I was attracted to the directness of the language (point, as my teacher demonstrated, clearly corresponded to a pointing of the foot), and the relationship of named steps to counts in the music. I had started taking violin lessons that same year, and was internalizing the structures that comprise Western music. I was also, rudimentarily, internalizing rhyme schemes in poetry through things I read on my own or at school; on some level I knew that, like a limerick, the steps followed an A-A-B-B-A structure.

When I was ten, I began to take classes at a local competition-dance studio. I was curious about expanding my movement palate; I craved other corporeal grammars. From age ten to sixteen, I moved between the local studio world and the Irish dance world. It was not always a graceful back-and-forth—I had to learn how to use my arms, for one thing.  

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As I entered my teenage years it was peak So You Think You Can Dance era; dance was in the culture. This was helpful. In third grade I had performed Irish dance for my largely disinterested classmates. But in high-school I improvised a competition-dance-style solo, socks pirouetting on a cheerleading mat, to garner my senior class the requisite points during senior week. I improvised to the song “How It Ends” by DeVotchKa (you might remember it from the movie Little Miss Sunshine). I followed the musical phrasing, rarely providing counterpoint; picture lots of body-rolls and rib cage isolations to illustrate melodic lines and drum-beats. When asked what kind of dance I was doing, I said it was “improv.”

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I remember the awe I felt in discovering that Irish dancers from other schools called their steps different things, like an American child’s introduction to chips and crisps. Our school was a treble school as opposed to a batter or rally school, a hop-up school rather than a knee school. We called them one-two-threes instead of skip-two-threes. But imagine my confusion when, later on in my first ballet class, I discovered that a passé was sort of like a hop-up—toe meeting knee—but executed with a turned-out knee, rather than a parallel one; or that fifth position in ballet was like our starting position in Irish dance—which, does anyone have a word for that? (For any readers who have studied both Irish dance and ballet or contemporary dance: let’s talk about what it’s like, after learning to keep your standing leg straight at all times, raised up on the balls of your feet, to be asked to bend both knees in a plié.) 

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“What kind of dance?” 

“Oh, I usually say I work in contemporary dance, or experimental dance; and no, modern isn’t quite it either…”

Referring to what I do as contemporary dance is both a cop-out and the only option I really have. I understand why it’s confusing. All “contemporary” connotes is that the work is being created now, contemporarily. But, with a handful of exceptions, I haven’t danced repertory work; I’ve been in the room, co-creating dance works with living choreographers.

I studied a bit of modern dance as a teenager: sprinklings of Graham, Horton, and Duncan at my local studio, a summer of Nikolais and Limón. But when I took my first dance class in college—a wonderfully raucous release technique class with Tiffany Rhynard—I discovered a tradition of American concert dance with which I’d previously been unfamiliar. I knew about Graham, Duncan and some of the other early Moderns, and Taylor and Pilobolus (from their appearance at the 2007 Oscars) but that was it: no Cunningham, no Judson, no relationship with improvisation beyond “improv.” I remember the first time I saw Trisha Brown dancing on film, the kinship I felt with her air, weight, sense of play and relationship to gravity. Here was a lineage where my lankiness made sense, where it lent itself to momentum and wind, suspension and release—and most importantly, where my intellectual interests aligned with my thirst for movement. I spent four years in the wonderfully experimental and experiential Middlebury College dance program, steeped in histories and practices developed in the postmodern dance era, then moved to New York City to continue that work.

“What kind of dance?”

“Well, it has its roots in what we call postmodern dance, but now we’re kind of post-post…Do you know Judson Church, off Washington Square? In the sixties, there were these dancers…” 

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As a writer and reader I have a vested interest in the power of a good title, and I’m sure this owes a lot to Irish dance. Many of the titles of our set dances would make fantastic novel titles. My first solo set-dance for my first Oireachtas was the boyishly mischievous “The Blue-Eyed Rascal.” It felt fitting at the time, but later I longed for the no-frills muscularity of “The Hunt,” the Francophile tragedy and romance of “Downfall of Paris” or “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” or the queerness of “King of the Fairies.” These titles could be torqued, played with: my friends and I jokingly modified “The White Blanket” to “The Wet Blanket,” and one of my teachers changed the title of “The Drunken Gauger” to “The Funny Tailor” to be more child-appropriate. And what, after all, is a gauger anyway?

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When I read the work of a writer I love, I fall asleep and wake up with the logic of their sentences pulsing in my mind. Right now I’m re-reading the quietly masterful Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, tilting toward her sense of balanced, poised and humble prose. On a deeper, less conscious level, I write with the rhythms of Irish music and dance in my mind, too, as all writers call on their influences and embodied histories. 

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“What do you write?”

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“Fiction.”

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“What kind of fiction?”

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“Literary fiction.”

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“But what genre?”

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“Fiction is the genre, but sometimes I deploy elements of thriller and horror, but in a literary way, and though it’s not super apparent in the work I’m also drawing on my years of traditional Irish dancing and contemporary dance, and classical music, also I watch a lot of movies, and on some level I’m sure those structures are showing up, and I care a lot about the way my sentences sound and how they feel to speak, it’s all quite sensory and associative, and it’s not about me but of course it’s about me, and I love all those mid-century writers, I can’t get enough of Iris Murdoch, she was born in Dublin, actually, but her Irishness is kind of complicated…Does that answer the question?”

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Glossary:

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Ceili:

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“A ceili is a type of group dance, featuring traditional movements in intricate shapes. Ceili dances performed in competition are selected from a book of traditional dances, and typically feature 4, 6, or 8 dancers. Ceili competitions are available at all levels of competition, from the local to world level.”

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From the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America glossary

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Feis:

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Plural: Feiseanna

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“A local Irish dancing competition, with competitions open to dancers of all ages and levels. Feiseanna are typically run on weekends by dance schools or local organizations. Dancers may choose to compete exclusively on the feis circuit or use these competitions as an opportunity to qualify for regional or national competitions if they desire.”

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From the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America glossary

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Oireachtas: 

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“Each region in North America (Southern US, New England, Mid Atlantic, Mid America, Western US, Eastern Canada, and Western Canada) hosts a qualifying championship event in the fall, usually in the weeks before and after Thanksgiving. The championship or Oireachtas is a qualifying event for dancers who place in the top of their age category to go on to compete at the North American Irish Dance Championships or even the World Championships. Dancers in Preliminary Champion and Open Champion are qualified to compete at the Oireachtas in the solo categories, and depending on the age(s) sometimes teachers are allowed to send more dancers at their own discretion. In addition to the solo competitions, there are also a number of categories for teams and traditional sets.”

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From the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America glossary

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Works referenced:

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I want to be ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom by Danielle Goldman

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Glossary / The Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America 

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Thank you to Jean Butler for the invitation to write this essay, and for your collaboration in articulating my intentions for it. Thanks to Molly Gott for your editorial feedback.

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Doug LeCours is a dancer, choreographer, and writer originally from New Hampshire. He trained in Irish dance with John Cunniffe, Suzanne Dunleavy McDonough, and Theresa Shaffer Wilkinson, and competed nationally and internationally. As a NYC-based professional dancer he performed in the work of John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin, Pavel Zuštiak, Keely Garfield, Julie Mayo, Catherine Galasso, Tess Dworman, and Ashley R.T. Yergens, and in reconstructions of works by Andy de Groat. His choreographic work has been presented by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, and AUNTS, among others; his duet collaborations with Sara Gibbons have been presented by Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange.

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He is a Zell Fellow in Fiction at the University of Michigan, where he earned his MFA. He is at work on his first novel. 

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