For many people step dancing is associated mainly with the Irish
step-dance stage shows, Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, which
assisted both in promoting the dance form and in placing Ireland
globally. But, in this book, Catherine Foley illustrates that the
practice and contexts of step dancing are much more complicated and
fluid. Tracing the trajectory of step dancing in Ireland, she tells
its story from roots in eighteenth-century Ireland to its diverse
cultural manifestations today. She examines the interrelationships
between step dancing and the changing historical and cultural
contexts of colonialism, nationalism, postcolonialism and
globalization, and shows that step dancing is a powerful tool of
embodiment and meaning that can provoke important questions
relating to culture and identity through the bodies of those who
perform it. Focusing on the rural European region of North Kerry in
the south-west of Ireland, Catherine Foley examines three
step-dance practices: one, the rural Molyneaux step-dance practice,
representing the end of a relatively long-lived system of teaching
by itinerant dancing masters in the region; two, RinceoirA na RA
ochta, a dance school representative of the urbanized staged,
competition orientated practice, cultivated by the cultural
nationalist movement, the Gaelic League, established at the end of
the nineteenth century, and practised today both in Ireland and
abroad; and three, the stylized, commoditized, folk-theatrical
practice of Siamsa TA re, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland,
established in North Kerry in the 1970s. Written from an
ethnochoreological perspective, Catherine Foley provides a rich
historical and ethnographic account of step dancing, step dancers
and cultural institutions in Ireland.
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