Valentine's Day Dance!

Date? No date?

This is one community event that'll make you cheery

No matter who you do or don't show up or leave with!!!

niiNIALL nnnn nnnTONY m

iO'LEARYnnnni DeMARCO

iGniG

Irish dance & music

A night of Irish dance for contra and square dancers

of any level of experience!!!

Both Niall and Tony are internationally acclaimed.

Niall is a Irish national step dance champion and an experienced dance caller in NYC.

Tony is considered one of the finest Sligo-style Irish fiddlers in the world.

What more is there to say!

Just show up and they'll do the rest!!!

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Irish Dance Traditions in America       

by Mick Moloney

There are two kinds of Irish dance; step dance, which is performance oriented and set and ceili dancing, which is generally social and non competitive.  Irish step dance took its shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in rural Ireland where it was invented and then taught by itinerant dancing masters. The masters received money and hospitality in return for their teaching services. There was a great deal of competition between rival masters; they vied with each other in introducing new steps and routines, and on occasion would challenge each other in public competitions at fairs and sporting events. The kind of dancing they taught was brought to America by Irish immigrants throughout the nineteenth century and Irish dancers were prominent all over America in minstrelsy, variety theater and vaudeville. Nowadays Irish dancing schools play a very important role in the presentation of Irish culture in America and they have produced some of the most brilliant dancers of our time.

The most common performance situation is competition, usually held at regional dancing feiseanna (festivals) organized by Irish-American organizations or by dancing schools. Winners and runners-up in the national North American championship are eligible to compete in the World Championships held each March in Ireland. As in the traditional music competitions, Irish-Americans have achieved considerable success over the years at the World Championships. Many of them have achieved renown through the commercial success of Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. These and other Irish dance extravaganzas have created multiple new professional performing options for Irish step dancers helping make Irish step dance among the most visible and celebrated aspects of Irish culture in the world today.

Another kind of Irish step dance known as sean nos (old style) is experiencing a resurgence of interest in Ireland and the United States. This kind of dance is non-institutionalized (though in recent times competitions have emerged with a predictable apparatus of judges and adjudicators) and the body orientation is much more fluid than in competitive step dance with a relaxed non-rigid body posture and the hands held loosely by the sides of the dancer in a style not unlike Appalachian clogging or Cape Breton step dance.

Ceili dances were choreographed and in a sense invented by the Gaelic League, an organization founded in Ireland in 1893 which had as its aim the preservation and promotion of aspects of the native culture that were deemed to be in danger of disappearing under British colonial rule. Primary aspects of the culture singled out in this regard were the Gaelic language and social dancing. Only those aspects of the dance tradition that seemed to be truly native were considered worthy of revival and these became known as ceili dances. Some familiar ones would be given nationalistic names such as The Walls of Limerick or The Siege of Ennis. Most were round or figure dances and mirroring the very conservative neo-Victorian ideology of the Gaelic Leaguers there was a lot of decorous swapping of partners and little boisterousness or undue intimacy between men and women. Gaelic League members were passionate about their mission as is evidenced by the following quote from a 1904 issue of the Gaelic American.

When the Gaelic League took up the revival of Irish national dances, it found them, like the language, confined to the last strongholds of the Gael in the remotest sections of the island. In the towns, villages, and less isolated portions of Ireland, the ancient dance like everything else, became Anglicized; vulgarisms like the Lancashire clog, and what the League designates "barrack-room steps," gradually crept into it until the beautiful and time-honored forms of the "poetry of motion" degenerated into an unsightly, unedifying, floor-pounding trial of endurance. The Gaelic League, through a system of elimination, has now the old dance pretty well re-established throughout Ireland. The syllabuses issued by the League for the great dancing contests held under its auspices invariably contain the warning: "Lancashire clog, stage and barrack-room steps barred."

These neo-Victorian, puritanical commentaries seem somewhat ridiculous to us today, but the position the Gaelic League took at that time raises a broader question of the value of strong affirmative action toward the traditional arts—the kind of patronage, in essence, that Western elite arts have enjoyed for centuries.

The Irish sets were derived from British or European social dances, particularly the quadrille, which swept across the country throughout the nineteenth century. These dances were freely adapted and altered across the land, and many took on distinct regional characteristics which endure to this day. They were often danced to imported musical forms such as the polka. Irish set dancing was bitterly opposed by Gaelic League members because its origins were clearly foreign.

Despite the opposition of the Gaelic League these Irish social dance traditions adapted readily to immigrant Irish community social life in America. Beginning in the early 20th century the Irish dance hall in major American cities became a very important social institution for the immigrant Irish. It was here that the newly arrived immigrant was introduced to the community. Here networks were established, courtships took place and future marriage partners were met. Frequently people from the same county who would probably never have met in Ireland met one another and fell in love. Irish American lore is full of tales of such meetings and the marriages which ensued.

Social dancing meant many things to the new immigrants and to young Americans of Irish ancestry. It represented an opportunity for a very American statement of personal liberation where young people could select their own life’s partners without the kind of old world social strictures previously imposed by family and community. This development was quite revolutionary, viewed in the context of a deeply conservative post-famine Irish society where arranged marriages had been the norm for great numbers of rural people from the 1850s onwards.

In America young immigrants could defiantly assert their right to choose their own partners in romance and marriage, and they did so freely. However, many chose to do so within the confines of the immigrant dance hall, where one was of course sure to meet opposite-sex partners from similar cultural backgrounds. So the ethnic dance hall in addition to furthering the cause of individual liberation was also an institution which encouraged social and cultural continuity.                   

The Irish American dance hall declined as a major institution in Irish American social life in the years leading up to the Second World War. After the war a few started up again but it was different times with many more social options for the young.

In the 1960s increasing prosperity in Ireland led to a population increase for the first time since the famine. Employment opportunities made it possible for young people to stay at home. This coincided with the abolition of the European immigrant quota by the American Congress, which was ironically enacted by a Democratic Congress under the leadership of Irish American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Accordingly, Irish immigration to the United States dropped off to a trickle. The days of the Irish dance hall in the United States were numbered. However, Kerry entrepreneur Bill Fuller operated a number of successful ballrooms in Manhattan at this time. His Center City ballroom, opened in New York in 1956, was hugely successful. Popular music was provided by bands such as Brendan Ward’s Orchestra while ceili music was provided by musicians such as piano accordionist Paddy Noonan and his band.

Technological advances in sound reinforcement and changes in popular music tastes radically changed the instrumental line-ups of the bands that played these new Irish dance halls. By the time County Galway accordion player Martin Mulhaire started playing with the Majestic Showband in Bill Fuller’s Irish dance halls in New York in the 1960s, vocalists were featured in practically all the Irish and Irish American ensembles and popular American music was something the Irish immigrants expected to hear at every dance.

In the showband we did a lot of country and western and we did the music right off the hit parade, right off the jukebox. ...We played for Bill Fuller, we played for Timmy Moynihan here in a place called the Old Red Mill, which was a great hang out for all the Irish people for years. We used to have 1500 people on a Sunday afternoon. We played something similar to the Irish Showband scene...We played for Irish audiences exclusively...The standard ballroom here at that time employed two bands. We'd have what we'd call the regular band which did popular music and country and western and then a three-piece ceili group which consisted of piano, drums and accordion and in The Red Mill where we played, we were playing the showband scene and at the same time Tommy Goodwin, Andy McGann and Timmy Geraghty were a three piece ceili group. So that was the scene. We played for forty-five minutes, and we took a break and then the ceili group came on to play like Irish waltzes or "The Siege of Ennis" or "The Stack of Barley" and that was about the extent of the Irish stuff. I was still holding down a full time job. [The audiences] were a mixture of Irish and Irish Americans but mostly in my time they were predominantly Irish right from the other side. They came here and I guess being new to the city they congregated wherever they would meet people of their own kind...There were six ballrooms in the city, and for Friday and Saturday and Sunday you'd have to just line up to get into any of them. 

All of these ballrooms had closed down by the 1970s due to lack of new immigrations and changing entertainment tastes. In the 1980s there was a big revival of interest in both set dancing in Ireland. Men and women of all ages and walks of life eagerly participated. It literally swept the country and the movement quickly spread to North America, creating many new performing opportunities for musicians who played for the dancing. At communal events such as summer schools and regional and national Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (Irish Musicians Association) gatherings many of the attendees over the past twenty years have been primarily interested in participating in set dances rather than music making. Set dance workshops are conducted by teachers mostly brought in from Ireland for the occasion. The mixture of experienced dancers with novices has led to the introduction of callers for the first time in Irish social dance. Most of the participants are Irish or Irish American but many people with no Irish ancestry at all also have developed an interest in this lively social scene. Set and ceili dances now come together in the same event along with couple dances such as old time waltzes, and old ideological divisions and tensions have long disappeared. Though the novelty has worn off somewhat and fewer younger participants now seem to be involved, social dancing still plays an important part in Irish American community life as it does in Appalachia and Cape Breton.

Mick Moloney
New York University
February 2008

Mick Moloney is the author of “Far From the Shamrock Shore: The story of Irish American History Through Song” released by Crown Publications in February of 2002 with an accompanying CD on Shanachie Records. He holds a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught ethnomusicology, folklore and Irish studies courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, and Villanova Universities, and currently teaches at New York University in the Irish Studies program.

He has recorded and produced over forty albums of traditional music and acted as advisor for scores of festivals and concerts all over America. Mick also served as the artistic director for several major arts tours including The Green Fields of America, an ensemble of Irish musicians, singers and dancers that toured across the United States on several occasions.