Step Dancing in Ireland: Culture and History

For many people step dance is associated mainly with the Irish step-dance stage show, Riverdance, which assisted in both promoting the dance form and in placing Ireland globally. But the practice and contexts of step dance are much more complicated and fluid than this. Catherine Foley tells the story of this dance from its roots in eighteenth-century Ireland to its modern globalized appeal. Focusing on North Kerry on the south-west coast of Ireland, she examines three step-dance practices: the rural Molyneaux step-dance practice, representing the end of a relatively long system of teaching by itinerant dancing masters in the region; two, the urbanized, staged, competition-orientated practice, cultivated by the cultural nationalist movement, the Gaelic League, from the end of the nineteenth century, and practised today both inside and outside of Ireland; and three, the stylized, commodified, theatrical practice of Siamsa Tire, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, established in North Kerry in the 1970s. The book provides a rich historical and ethnographic account of step dancing, step dancers, and cultural institutions in Ireland.