I notice myself doing it from time to time, my body assuming poses once—evidently still—second-nature: my feet in a V formation, or the left foot still maintaining its side of the V and the right foot in front of the other, ankle turned out, squaring off the angle. In a recent physical therapy appointment, I talked about being prone to locking my knees, keeping my legs firmly in place. I’m trying to practice keeping my knees in a more relaxed bend throughout the day when I’m on my feet. This is contrary to the movements I spent a decade practicing and perfecting as an Irish dancer.
I started Irish dancing around the age of 5, in 1998, after being entranced and excited at seeing Trinity Academy dancers performing at a local public venue. At first, dancing didn’t stick. I was unsure of how to move my legs and feet rhythmically; the movements didn’t come easily. But I returned to the dance studio two years later, more earnestly, that time sticking around for ten years.
This was during the Celtic Tiger period, the years between the 1990s and aughts when Ireland’s previously depressed economy was making a comeback. Stateside, the descendants of those who fled the Great Hunger in search of more of a chance at prosperity or even just survival, we received Irish cultural exports that made mainstream waves: while U2, Sinéad O’Connor, The Cranberries, and Enya brought new attention to Ireland through music starting in the 1980s, Riverdance and Lord of the Dance popularized traditional Irish dance a decade later. For generations, Irish dance in America remained rooted in Irish immigrant communities (my dance lessons were, for years, held at Milwaukee’s Irish Cultural Heritage Center), and it was during this period that Irish dancing really began branching beyond the cultural heritage and immigrant groups that had been maintaining the practice and memory.
In this expansion, though, it also became increasingly competitive and commodified. As I progressed and advanced into new levels, the dancing became more seriously competitive as the popularity for it grew, and the costuming more ornate, even flashy, all the time pushing into new degrees of pomp as the practice itself continued its evolution. Despite having naturally curly hair, I at first put it in curlers to make my curls tighter and to ensure that my hair would hold as I danced; eventually, I tucked my curls away completely, stuffing them into a wig full of synthetically perfect, tightly spiraling, thick coils. Each year, it seemed, the wigs became bigger; there was even a trend of wearing two at once, with increasing significance being tied to success at feiseanna (dance competitions) and at those competitions, how elaborate or striking your costumed appearance was, and increasingly away from dancing just for the sake of it: to share it with others through performances, to connect with others through it socially, or simply to participate in it to connect with one’s heritage. There is, of course, a class dimension to this: how much could one afford to participate in modern competitively-driven Irish dance? Though competition has always been a part of Irish dance culture, the focus on it today has come to dominate Irish dance as we know it. The brightly colored and intricately designed (with inspiration traditionally from the Book of Kells) dresses that we know of modern Irish dance evolved out of the tradition of wearing one’s “Sunday best” to the feis. Under the veneer of today’s sequins and lamés, Irish dance is still, at its heart, folk practice.
By the time that I put my wigs, shoes, and sequined dresses away for good, at the age of 18, I’d already cut back my involvement: I quit competing about eight months earlier, reasoning that I’d achieved enough, knowing that I certainly didn’t care about advancing any further via competition-cum-pageantry. But I still wanted to perform, to share the traditions with audiences, to continue to find rhythm to the bodhrán, tin whistle, fiddle, and accordion through my feet. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it earnestly as a teenager, I loved the traditional songs, and I loved the footwork that we choreographed to fit the bars of music.
St. Patrick’s Day always meant clusters of performances. I often took the day off from school in order to shuttle around to other schools in the Milwaukee area for dance performance after dance performance. The day usually culminated in an Irish pub, where we would dance for the patrons. It was in those pubs that I developed a distaste for what the holiday represents to a large swath of Americans; these performances were lessons in body politics, and simultaneously with my sentiments for the holiday, I became all-too aware and critical of the (drunk) male gaze. I danced harder at those shows, the vitriol I felt powering my feet to move more sharply and stomp more forcefully on the floor, but I had no desire to smile at the audience, not wanting to make any effort to bring them into what I was doing. These were men who brought out their kilts twice a year—on St. Patrick’s Day, and likely for Milwaukee’s Irish Fest in August—and who pair them with shirts that say, “What happens under the kilt stays under the kilt.”
My heart aches to see a culture reduced to commodification, cheapened, made marketable through self-erasure and self-caricaturing, though paradoxically, at once: the Irish culture that we are fed is largely hollow when it comes to understanding the political and historical contexts that make preserving its culture all the more important; St. Patrick’s Day is most commonly acknowledged as a drinking holiday, reinforcing the stereotype of Irish alcoholism—an alcoholism which would be fair to see as an effect of the trauma of being colonized and of being the subjects of systematic erasure. I bristle at much of what St. Patrick’s Day signifies here; I bristled at the Squarespace ad featuring Barry Keoghan delivering laptops to inhabitants of the west of Ireland to make their livelihoods “real.” The most real thing about that is the colonial gaze.
After quitting dancing, I struggled to connect with Irish culture, feeling like I’d soured on so much of what it came to represent through how it had evolved in the time that I spent entrenched in the competitive eclipse of Irish step dancing. There, I was missing the forest for the trees, feeling that competition and the commodification of the culture were obstacles to my ability to appreciate it. In early 2020, I traveled to Ireland for the first time, and for the first time, felt that elusive ability to connect with what I was surrounded by and experiencing, something I didn’t always feel during my dancing years. I leaned into the ease of being there, the slow pace, the openness for conversation. I was, quite simply, existing: there was no pressure to compete for another trophy or conform to stereotypes. I’ve found new ways of engaging with, and enjoying, Irish culture since that trip, and that’s meant digging a bit beneath the surface-level—both of cultural figures and of my own conceptions of my heritage. Ian Lynch, of the band Lankum and the podcast Fire Draw Near, spoke in an interview with the Irish Examiner about what so many popular Irish cultural icons have signified for the state of Irish culture and overall understanding of Irish cultural identity: “[Lynch] points to the hundreds of versions of [the song] ‘The Wild Rover,’ including by the likes of Dropkick Murphys, that YouTube throws up. ‘When you think about the fact that this is their version of Irishness, falling around in the pub, I actually felt quite offended by it when I started looking at these videos and realizing what it’s all tied up in. In that way, I started to feel like I did want to reclaim it and I did want to maybe educate people a bit.” The interview is in response to Lankum’s version of ‘The Wild Rover,’ which subverts the garrulous, fun message that it’s typically known for, turning it into an expression of regret and remorse over the ways the protagonist in the song has lived, having “spent half [his] money drinking strong ale and beer.”
It was through dancing that I was educated in these cultural stereotypes, but also that I learned more about the history of Irish oppression, and the way that dance signified an attempt at freedom and at the reclamation of cultural identity. Some lore has it that the strictly held torso and arms kept firmly to the sides of the body are a vestige of the banning of dancing during British colonial rule; other theories argue that arms are kept straight so as not to distract from the intricate footwork at the heart of Irish dancing, and that this was a way for the Catholic Church to restrict opposite sexes from holding hands. It makes sense that this is the lore that we heard: it served the purpose of the period of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as the stiffly controlled style catered to the formality of institutionalized learning that focused on individual competition. I doubt that anyone who complements my posture knows how many times I’ve heard dance teachers yell, “SHOULDERS BACK!” This broke from the style that was popular during the Gaelic revival of the 19th century, whose goal was the preservation of a language and culture in peril under the British colonial rule’s forced Anglicization. Through the Gaelic League, the first Irish ceili—a gathering for playing music and socially dancing—was held in 1897.
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1853, the Ossianic Society, an Irish literary society was formed, its founders intent on protecting the Irish language through its representation in literature as English became the dominant language used throughout most of Ireland. Today in Ireland, the week around St. Patrick’s Day is Seachtain na Gaelige (“Irish Language Week”), when there’s increased effort to learn and use the language. Every year on this day, when I see lines stretching down the block to get into Irish pubs, I find myself frustrated that this is what Irish culture has been distilled into here in the United States, but motivated to reclaim the holiday to derive deeper meaning from it and from the culture that is forever imprinted into the memory of the muscles in my legs and feet.
Thanks for reading! My writing is reader-supported, and until March 18, you can get 10% off of a paid subscription, a rate you’ll pay forever.