Photo by Nir Arieli.

There is a photograph of my grandad and three of his brothers taken in Dublin in the early 1930s; the brothers stand in a row and pose with their arms firmly placed by their sides or their hands on their hips. They wear what are known as “hard shoes” in Irish dance, made of black leather with plain silver buckles, knee-high socks, and a brooch later pawned off, never to be retraced. 

Photo courtesy of the author.

You can’t tell at first glance, but they’re all wearing the same overcoat and kilt. In fact, this isn’t one photograph but four. The family could only afford one Irish dancing costume, so each of the boys were photographed individually, wearing the same outfit, and the photos were stitched together into a single family portrait. It is the earliest (and only material) record of Irish dance that exists in my family, though there are many stories – of dancing in the kitchen to the 1960s dance radio program Take the Floor, of summers spent in the Gaeltacht learning sean-nós, and even pulling a village door off its hinges to dance on.

I am reminded of the last story in particular when I step into Jean Butler’s promenade dance piece What We Hold at the Irish Arts Center. When you enter the black box theatre, sparsely lit by a few stage lights, you encounter a dancer who has already begun to shuffle and treble in place. Gathering around James Greenan, a former Riverdance principal and champion Irish dancer from County Cavan, audience members watch as he drums his feet into the ground with increasing speed and intensity. There is no other sound, no music, just the percussion of his feet, which, in time, becomes its own melody. The synthetic dance floor makes up the piece’s soundscape – reverberations of fiberglass beating into the ground.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last several months watching videos from Gaza on social media, but I couldn’t ignore how much this battering staccato sounded like the bombing and shelling I’d heard, and how much it reminded me, too, of the sounds of the ‘Troubles’, the thirty year long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. From Derry to Gaza, these sounds call to mind violent histories of occupation and militarism, reminding us that the ground we choreograph on is never neutral. The Romanian poet, Paul Celan, says, “no-one bears witness for the witness.” This impossibility of testimony and memory elicit important questions for the viewers of Butler’s piece: What kinds of histories can be read through the moving body? Whose memories are disappeared when these embodied cultural practices are not recorded? What We Hold is a response to those present-absences, to the largely neglected history of Irish dance. I get the sense that here, Butler is inviting us to attempt to bear witness to these histories and legacies of colonialism and trauma, of collective survival and joy, through the bodies of these dancers. 

Greenan continues to dance atop a square piece of laminate for over ten minutes. He never leaves it. It is as much a stamina piece, as it is a tribute to the tradition of door dancing. In various small towns in Ireland after a long day of work, people would get together and hold a dance. They would remove the door to provide a flat surface and dance within its limited confines – sometimes even placing glasses of water on the corners to see who would spill the least amount and be deemed the best dancer. Greenan stares at himself as he dances, alternating his gaze between the two standing mirrors that face him and, depending on where you are standing, the audience. In watching himself practice, he/we become(s) a witness, bringing back to life a history that has been rendered absent.

The guiding question of What We Hold seems to be: is an archive of the ephemeral possible? Can we expand how we traditionally envisage the archive – beyond the material, the object, and towards the gestural, the performative? This is an archive concerned with re-drawing traditional boundaries and forms, mourning the erasure of cultural practices, and honoring the ones we still know and still dance. 

The light shifts and Butler steps out of the dark again to invite us to move towards another performer, Colin Dunne. Greenan takes a seat alongside the audience and watches Dunne on a raised platform, staring intently ahead. A disembodied voice echoes throughout the space, “Stops starts stops starts stops starts,” commanding Dunne as he shifts back and forth in place. Dunne, well-known in the world of traditional Irish dance and choreography, traces his foot in the familiar steps but pauses (“stops, starts”) forcing the audience to wait in anticipation of his next move. His upper body flows freely; there is restraint but then, in no time, freedom. Dunne’s solo evokes the tradition of sean-nós, meaning “old style,” a free-form specialization of Irish dance that is characterized by improvisation, spontaneity, and the free movement of arms. His expressive, liberated approach is in contrast to Greenan, who opens Butler’s piece with a militarized style of Irish dance that features drills and repetition. 

 When Butler leads us to the next room, we are met with a cacophony of conversation: interview clips, and people telling stories, some louder than others. It is impossible to hear any of the soundbites individually, and all of the voices blend. The listener only ever receives fragments of each story: 

“I kind of got to like it, particularly when I saw the heavy shoes – all that banging and everything.”

“It was just like he was telling you a story with his feet. He would have moved his body as well. It wouldn’t have been…straight, hands in by the side.”

“Dancing was the poor man’s game.” 

 These voices are a part of Jean Butler’s project Our Steps, Our Story, a legacy archive in partnership with the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library. Our Steps features over 200 hours of curated material – both video and audio resources – that tell the personal histories of generations of teachers and Irish dancers, documenting steps, choreography, and methods previously unrecorded. In her video archive, Butler tells students that she is trying to reconstruct a style of dance that is in danger of being lost. She says, “What I’m talking to you about is my memory of not only dancing this but of watching other people dance this.” Memory is all that is left of many of these steps. Oral historian Mary Friel argues that Irish dance, like many indigenous folk dances, was “subjected to changes in transmission and interpretation”[1] over time. Butler recognizes that we do not know the version of the dance we are in, but with this project, she ensures that we are attempting to fill the gap in the archive.

 And then, another voice floats through the room – “We did it without any shoes.” – and I am reminded of when my grandmother died. My cousins and I removed our funeral shoes and danced barefoot in front of her open casket. Hop, one, two. Hop, one, two. Steps we had performed in front of her many times before. If choreography is a form of writing, this dance was our epitaph. 

As audience members listen to these oral histories, Butler ushers us to sit together at a long dining room table of approximately fifty seats. Butler and two other dancers, Maren Shanks and Kaitlyn Sardin, stand on the table in front of us, arch their shoulders, and walk slowly towards one another. Their posture straightens again, spines erect, as their hands trace their backsides; a familiar position for anyone who has been a competitive Irish dancer. 

Photo by Nir Arieli.

As I watch them curl their hands into fists and roll their wrists, I recall my own years of spine-straightening dance practice. Grandad converted our attic floor into a practice room with mirrors so that my cousin, Natalie, and I could spend mornings and evenings drilling our steps in, perfecting our hop-overs. In fact, the color of this table is the exact shade of wood of the floor I grew up dancing on. My sister tells stories of watching the ceiling fan swing back and forth for hours as we practiced our hard shoe above. Here we learned sets like the Planxty Drury, Job of the Journeywork, and Orange Rogue – sets that tell their own stories; sets that I will sometimes tap out on my fingers while waiting on a subway platform. They live within me and seem at times to demand to be danced, to be remembered, as if they know how much of our indigenous practices have already been lost.

Despite being one of the oldest written languages in the world, in 2021, UNESCO declared the Irish language “definitely endangered.” For more than six centuries, British policy and colonial law like the 1366 Statute of Kilkenny and the 1537 Statute of Ireland – An Act for the English Order Habit and Language, decimated Irish languages and practices. When a people can no longer speak or write in their native tongue, how do they tell their stories? How do they get passed down? Does dance, as a site of embodied memory, become the only way to store and transmit indigenous knowledge?

Finally, we are left alone with Butler who powerfully reclaims our voyeuristic gaze by staring at us while we stare at her. We watch as she maps out the pulse of a shuffle with her foot, breaking down each instance of the movement before she takes off and escorts us, once again, to another room. 

Here we see all of the dancers together. Butler is reminding us that archiving is always a collective effort: This piece, and this history is interracial and intergenerational. Kaitlyn Sardin, a Black queer Irish dancer whose viral TikTok videos combine Irish dance, hip hop and dancehall, in many ways represents the future of the form. Maren Shanks, a 15-year-old dancer from Dublin, playfully runs around the circle of performers in soft shoes and watches her elders remember and rehearse steps. Tom Cashin, a 70-year-old first-generation Irish American, tenderly dances the Kilkenny Races, a piece choreographed in the 1960s by James Erwin, a beloved New York-based Irish dance teacher. At the end of the sixty-minute performance, the dancers come together in a final circuitous outburst of joy. They throw their hands in the air, twist and turn their bodies, release the constrictions of their torsos, and finally, let loose.

What is it, then, that we hold? Butler tells us that, “the piece can read to be about many things: how we hold the body the verticality of an erect spine, the arms held at one’s side…but there is also the sense of the body as a vessel, a container that holds imprints of the past.” It is as much about holding the past as it is about paving the future. The dancers reconcile their shifting, at times contradictory, experiences of Irishness on the dance floor. By blending these many forms of Irish, modern, and contemporary dance, Butler’s collective choreography acts as a kind of methexis – with every stamp, shuffle, and twist of the foot, the dance becomes a living trace of Irish history. 

Something happens when the unyielding body begins to shake again – stories and histories are unearthed, they transmit our cultural memories, and articulate a dizzying and disorienting history. What We Hold reveals those truths, and offers new imaginings and possibilities for a particular kind of moving again.

END NOTES:

[1]: Friel, Mary. Dancing as a social pastime in the south-east of Ireland, 1800-1897. Dublin: Four Courts, 2004. Print.