Dancer Interviews:

Back in February, I took my students, a college class, to see Jean Butler’s What We Hold at the Irish Arts Center. Many were encountering Irish dance for the first time, so I prefaced our visit by showing them what have become some common associations with the form: the pageantry of competition on the one hand, the theatrical extravagance of Riverdance on the other. I tried to explain that Jean’s work would not replicate either of these reference points; that in fact, she had long been interested in pushing back against these modes of spectacle; that the worlds she conjured onstage were typically quieter, more pared-down.

Despite my contextualizing efforts, at least a few students came away frustrated that their expectations had not been met. They had been awaiting what we saw in class: the glitz and tricks of the championship stage; the sweep and scale ofthe commercial show. When I shared this anecdote with Jean recently, she sounded not at all surprised or bothered.

“That’s a common complaint of my work,” she told me. “That it doesn’t meet the expectation of what Irish dance is known to do now.” For those attached to a particular image of the form, it seems not to matter that, as she put it dryly, “I haven’t been in Riverdance for 30 years.” But Jean long ago shook that attachment for herself, forging ahead in her own lane.

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What We Hold, which premiered at the Dublin Theater Festival in 2022 and ran for three weeks at Manhattan’s Irish Arts Center last winter, is a resolutely minimal work. Like much of Jean’s choreography of the past two decades, which has explored the intersections of Irish and contemporary dance, it forgoes any traces of flash for a streamlined elegance. At the same time, it marks a return within her practice to communing more directly with tradition. In each of the show’s four scenes — which, at the IAC, carried viewers through various spaces of the black box theater — Jean and her intergenerational cast, along with the composer Ryan Seaton, seem to be coaxing us toward some aspect of Irish dance’s essence: its rhythm, rituals, comportment; the communities and histories it embodies.

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 “In Jean’s work, I see a distillation of the form, a very clear idea of what its foundation is about,” said Linda Murray, the curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, when I asked her about Jean’s subtle defiance of spectacle. (A good friend of Jean’s, originally from Dublin, she saw What We Hold multiple times during its New York run.) “I think Jean is trying to strip Irish dance back to the place where we can understand its vocabulary again, and then she’s asking what that vocabulary can say in a contemporary context.” The work does not accomplish this by shouting, or by seeking to grab our attention. It invites us, rather, to gather around and listen.

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 The mirror

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What We Hold opens with an image recognizable to any competitive Irish dancer, one that transported me back to my own days of daily practice in the basement of my childhood home. On a wooden board, before two full-length mirrors, the dancer James Greenan drills a hard-shoe phrase over and over, his crisp taps cutting through the silence, gradually building in complexity. The audience crowds around him in the dimly lighted space, eyes fixed on his actual feet or on one of his two reflections. While serving the practical purpose of providing a good view, the doubled mirror has a dramatic effect, too, compounding the sense of pressure inherent in this solitary, self-scrutinizing ritual: to achieve perfection, to not miss a beat. Again, again, again.

Dressed in a tank top and shorts, James could be practicing for anything, maybe getting in shape for a show. (He is a former Riverdance principal.) But what I saw in this mesmerizing marathon of an opening — he keeps going for 10 minutes straight — were the hours of preparation behind competition specifically. For outsiders to Irish dance, it’s easy to gawk at the presentational layers that have been heaped upon competitors, men and women alike (though the costuming for men is notably simpler): the dresses, the wigs, the rhinestone-studded vests. It’s rarer to get a glimpse into this private world of training, where the dancer is alone with the body and sound, competing with no one but himself.

The pendulum

On the heels of this stark but impressive display of technique comes a softer, ghostlier image.The audience moves from just inside the theater doors, the site of James’s solo, into the main area of the black box, where Colin Dunne stands on a rectangular platform, just barely illuminated in the darkened space. In contrast to the rapid-fire steps we’ve just witnessed — a virtuosity that viewers might expect from Colin, too — he draws from a decidedly mellower movement palette, rocking back and forth in profile on the soles of his feet, sometimes adding a twist of the torso or swing of an arm. In his pendular motion, there’s a hesitation, an uncertainty, the body pulled in opposing directions. Jean tells me that in developing this moment, she was thinking about time’s passage: “Where is he between tradition and modernity? Where is all of this work between those two places?”

Another kind of oscillation, meanwhile, is happening sonically, as Ryan Seaton’s score, entering the space for the first time, zooms back and forth across a sound sculpture stretched overhead like a telephone wire. The delicate assemblage of speakers emits a haunting, fragmented mix of low voices, melodic fiddle, scratchy static, and what could be galloping hooves or drumming feet. In each scene so far, we have been watching just one dancer, but now, awash in this swirl of sound, the theater feels populated by many more.

The table

The chatter of voices in the score grows larger, louder, as we migrate to the next room, slipping behind a curtain to find a long wooden table surrounded by stools. The voices seem to migrate, too, now originating from beneath the table, like a foundation for the dancing that will happen on top. We hear people reminiscing about where they used to dance: in an old building with a winding staircase, the back room of a bar, a one-room social hall with a wooden floor. They share their earliest recollections of dance class and how dancing fit into their social and family lives. “The money just wasn’t there to buy instruments,” one voice says. “Dancing was the poor man’s game.”

As if not to overpower these memories (which come from the Our Steps oral history collection, a project initiated by Jean in collaboration with the NYPL), the movement in this section is like a whisper. The seating places us at eye level with the feet of three dancers, who seem to represent three generations ofIrish dance, and perhaps three stages of Jean’s own dance journey: Maren Shanks (in soft shoes), Kaitlyn Sardin (in socks), and Jean (in bare feet). Standing atop the top table, they break down, in unison, the basic posture with which a solo dance begins, sliding a pointed foot forward, rolling the shoulders back, curling the fingers into fists. It’s a sequence emblematic of a dancer’s first lesson. But here, it gives rise to steps that sway from the strict, frontal carriage expected in the classroom, especially as Jean is left alone, the other dancers having quietly exited. In a brief, intimate solo, she lets the ripple effects of footwork flow through her hips and arms, so that a twisting of the ankles or a bobbing on the balls of the feet becomes a more expansive gesture.

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Still, the feet remain the focus. As she knocks a heel or brushes a toe against the wood, as she balances and strides, she draws awareness to the strength and articulation of the Irish dancer’s most essential tool. While Jean has performed barefoot for years, the choice to do so in this context, at such close proximity to the audience, is somehow more potent, as if to say: here, in these tendons and bones, is where the real work of Irish dance happens.

The collective

If this solo highlights the body itself, the final and longest section zooms back out to community, relationships, the continuum of generations. Back in the main space of the theater, the full cast awaits us, at first simply standing still: Jean, Colin, Kaitlyn, James, and Maren (the youngest, at 15), joined by Kristyn Fontanella, Marion Cronin, and Tom Cashin (the oldest, at 70). Ryan is there, too, mixing the sound, which, in this culminating scene, leans into lush and ethereal strings, by turns atmospheric and propulsively rhythmic.

Much of what follows evokes ceilí or social dancing, as the dancers eddy and weave among one another with repeating heel-ball-toe or front-side-back steps. From these communal structures, little crescendos swell up and fade away, as when Maren takes whooshing laps around the stage, like a beacon of Irish dance’s future; or when Jean and Colin, friends of 30 years and former co-stars, come together for a fleeting duet, the most understated reunion. (Rehearsing this part in the studio, “it was kind kind of like we had never left,” Colin told me.)

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In one of the work’s most poignant passages, Tom takes center stage with his rendition of KilkennyRaces, a set dance he learned in his teens. A set is often the defining moment of a championship, for which a dancer might practice with the intensity seen in James’s opening solo. Tom has held onto his for 50-some years, still imbuing each step with pride and care.

As captivating as they are, these solo and duet moments still feel woven into the fabric of the group, not separate from it. And it’s this sense of collectivity that What We Hold, in its stripping away and paring down, reveals most clearly. As the work progresses, from its solitary beginning to its joyful finale, the “we”of the title comes into sharper view. It’s felt in the voices that waft through the space, the smiles exchanged among the dancers, the groove they find together in the end. Irish dance so often emphasizes the individual: the solo competitor, the principal dancer. What We Hold reminds us that tradition is a constellation of relationships, and many people, each a link in a long lineage, will carry it forward.

Thank you to Jean Butler, Colin Dunne, Linda Murray, and my Dance in New York City students for conversations that informed these reflections.

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