A History of Irish Step Dance

Irish step dance as it is performed today is roughly two hundred and fifty years old in its technique, a hundred and twenty in its institutions, and thirty in its public image. Keeping those three clocks separate makes the whole story easier to follow.

Before the record

Dance in Ireland before the eighteenth century is poorly documented and easy to romanticise. Travellers' accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mention dancing at gatherings, in the round and in lines, and note that it was widespread and enthusiastic; they do not describe steps. Church and civil authorities complained about it periodically, which is itself evidence of scale. What none of it establishes is a continuous line from any medieval practice to the modern form.

The honest position is that the deep past supplies context rather than choreography. What can be said is that by the early eighteenth century Ireland had a strong social dance culture, that it was tied to fixed calendar occasions and to the crossroads and the kitchen, and that it was danced to a native instrumental repertoire that we do know a great deal about.

The dancing masters

The recognisable ancestor of modern step dance appears in the eighteenth century in the form of the itinerant dancing master. These were professional teachers, concentrated in Munster and the south-west, who travelled a fixed circuit of parishes and stayed some weeks in each, boarding with a family and teaching in a barn or a farmhouse kitchen. They were paid in coin or in kind, they guarded their territory jealously, and they were figures of some local status — usually described as flamboyantly dressed and carrying a staff.

Their teaching produced the technical signature of the form. Working in confined spaces, often on a flagstone or a door laid flat, they developed a vocabulary that is vertical rather than travelling: high on the toes, feet crossed, footwork intricate and close, upper body deliberately still. The rigid arms so often remarked upon are best understood as a by-product of that emphasis, not a rule handed down from anywhere. When the available floor is four feet square, you dance upward.

Dancing masters also competed. Accounts describe contests between rival masters, sometimes on a barrel top or a table, judged by endurance and invention. That competitive instinct — one dancer, a small stage, a crowd deciding — is the direct ancestor of everything on a modern competition day, long before there were grades or adjudicators.

The nineteenth century: contraction and emigration

The Famine of the 1840s and the mass emigration that followed and continued for a century removed both the population and the occasions that sustained the tradition in much of rural Ireland. The dancing masters' circuits thinned. At the same time, emigration exported the form: Irish communities in North America, Britain and Australia kept dancing, and in some cases preserved older material that faded at home.

Something of the nineteenth-century texture is recoverable from folklore collecting done later. The Schools' Collection, compiled from Irish schoolchildren and their older relatives in 1937 and 1938, contains a great deal of incidental description of house dances, crossroads dancing, local musicians and customs, and it is one of the best windows onto what ordinary dancing looked like before it was organised. The wider material culture of that world — the kitchens, the half-doors, the instruments — is documented in the National Museum of Ireland's country life collections.

The revival and the rulebook

The Gaelic League, founded in 1893 to revive the Irish language, quickly extended into music and dance, and its instrument for that was the competitive festival — the feis. Competition required consistency, consistency required standards, and standards required someone to set them.

The result, in 1927, was An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha, the Irish Dancing Commission, established under the Gaelic League to certify teachers and adjudicators and to codify the dances. Its effect was enormous and double-edged. It produced examined qualifications for teachers, a standard body of figure dances, a stable competitive structure and, in time, a global network. It also fixed a set of choices — which dances counted, which steps were correct, what the dress should look like — that had previously varied from parish to parish.

By the middle of the twentieth century the tradition had been thoroughly institutionalised. A dancer learned a codified solo repertoire from a certified teacher, competed in a graded structure, and wore a recognisably standard costume. This is the version most people mean when they say "traditional" Irish dance, and it is a twentieth-century construction resting on eighteenth-century technique.

The 1990s and the global audience

The change that made Irish step dance globally famous came from outside the competitive world. A short interval performance on Irish television in 1994, and the touring stage productions that grew out of it, put the form in front of an audience of tens of millions who had never seen it, and did so in a deliberately theatrical register: a line of dancers moving as one, amplified hard-shoe rhythm, arms occasionally free, and stagecraft borrowed from musical theatre.

The consequences inside the tradition were immediate. Enrolment in schools rose sharply across the diaspora and beyond it. Competition standards climbed as the pool of dancers grew. The theatrical aesthetic fed back into competitive dancing, raising the emphasis on elevation, speed and visual impact. And the dress changed faster in the following two decades than in the preceding six.

Where the tradition sits now

Contemporary Irish step dance is a global competitive form with a substantial professional performing sector attached, taught in dozens of countries, governed by several organisations that certify teachers and run parallel championships. It is technically far more demanding than it was fifty years ago and visually far more elaborate.

What it has partly lost is the local: the parish-by-parish variation the dancing masters produced, and the ordinary social dancing that once surrounded the virtuoso stuff. Both survive, but they survive as conscious revivals rather than as defaults. That is the recurring shape of the whole story — every gain in reach and standard has been paid for in variety, and the tradition has generally judged the trade worth making.

Sources and institutions referred to on this page are listed on the further reading page.