Siobhan Burke
June 2023

Reels and Feels: A conversation with Kaitlyn Sardin

The noise. I was like, this is so cool, I want to make noise! It was loud compared to ballet. Even now, I love the rhythm of hard shoe. It’s one of my favorite things about Irish dancing.

Gyula Glaser
March 2023

Shaping Ethnic Identities: A Hungarian-born Irish step dancer in Germany

Precision is a quality commonly associated with German people. While it might be a generalization, I would suggest that Germans are drawn to Irish dance because of its structured rhythmic nature and organized deportment of the body, as defined by the Gaelic League — how the form embodies precision through movement.

Colin Dunne
July 2022

Summer Reading: Colin Dunne

The first time I read The Story of Irish Dance by Helen Brennan, on the day she gave me a copy in 2004, I devoured it from front to back. If you’re an Irish dancer of any description and you haven’t read it, you should. It’s brilliantly written, and we can all find something of ...

Kate Spanos
March 2022

Irish Dance on Repeat: Archiving the Dance and Dancing the Archive

When I hear “The Blackbird,” for example, neurons begin to fire. Even if I’m not actually moving, I feel the dance light up inside me. My toes start to twitch and I feel my breathing sync up with the melodic rhythm. When I dance the archive, I feel as if I’m connected to ...

Siobhan Burke with Doug LeCours, Mickey Mahar, and Michael Thurin
December 2021

“You Can’t Really Talk About It with Other People”: A Conversation on Irish Dance

"Every so often, I would learn about someone on the same unusual journey, from the rigidity of Irish dance—and its rule-bound network of competitions—to more open-ended, exploratory lineages of postmodern dance. . . . The conversation that follows grew out of ...

Rosanna Jahangard
September 2021

Reflections of a Half-Iranian Irish Dancer:  What it Means to Feel Different in the  Homogeneous World of Irish Step Dance

My skin was not pale. And despite the growing global phenomenon of shows like Riverdance, along with the worldwide spread of Irish dance schools, I knew of nobody who looked like me dancing professionally at the time. I did, however, have a “claim” to Irishness ...

Jean Butler
June 2021

New Horizons: Six Irish Dancers on the Impact of Covid-19

It is impossible to calculate the difficulty and turmoil the last year imposed on the performing arts. Perhaps it was my inability to articulate the pandemic’s impact on my own work and life that made me wonder how other dancers, specifically Irish dancers ...

Nic Gareiss
March 2021

Light in my Loafers: Thoughts on Queer Irish Dancestry

 I’ve been wondering lately whose Irish dance stories are allowed to be archived, and which parts of those stories we allow ourselves to forget. More specifically, I’ve been asking myself whether there is space for queerness in our shared memories of Irish step dance ...

Jean Butler
April 2019

Dancing with Ghosts: Legacy & Lineage

I love to listen to dancers talk about their work, where it comes from, why, and how it happens. I love to feel the moment when the light bulb goes on and I think- “I know how you feel, I know what you are talking about.” I belong.

Deborah Jowitt
C.1988

Preface to "Time and the Dancing Image"

The so-called "modern dance" tends to progress by violent redefinitions: choreographers reject those images that mirror the past and then start over. The more codified, less idiosyncratic field of ballet advances by absorbing innovations into an existing vocabulary of ...

Siobhan Burke
July 2019

Keeping Time: An Overview of Our Steps

As the standard of competition grows ever more demanding — steps filling up with more beats and more tricks — there’s little space to pause and reflect, so strong is the drive to accelerate and excel. Within this race forward, Our Steps is a deep breath.

J.G. O’Keefe & Art O’Brien
1902

Modern Irish Dancing

There are some features in connection with Irish dancing as it is seen today in Irish towns and cities which call for passing comment. The first thing that strikes any observer is that ease and grace and beauty of movement are almost invariably sacrificed to ...

Edwin Denby
Oct — Nov 1939

A Note to Composers

A composer who is unfamiliar with the theatre who is interested in writing ballets should certainly see the bug companies as often as possible and watch what happens. I think he should start by watching Sylphides or Carnaval (now in the Monte Carlo repertory,) ...

Dialogues

An ever-evolving collection of found and commissioned essays that celebrate and interrogate ideas related to Irish dance and contemporary arts practice — reflecting where we’ve been, revealing where we’re going.

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