The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities, 1900–2000 by Barbara O’Connor (review)

Irish dance is, by nature, peculiar. It has been variously called a dance form, a hobby, and a sport, and arguments about which term best suits its nature are frequently posed. It is loved or vilified as indicative of performative and competitive brilliance, or as gaudy spectacle. Irish dance continually pushes the boundaries of tradition and post modernity. Moreover, it can lead people to ponder deeper questions of race and gender, nationality, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. As such, the field of Irish dance is ready for a retrospective, which Barbara O’Connor successfully sets out to record in The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities, 1900–2000. This is especially relevant this year, as Riverdance, a seven-minute performance on the 1994 Eurovision contest and subsequent global commercially successful dance show, is currently in the midst of celebrating its twentieth anniversary.

“The Irish Dancing” of the title has of been written about in books that are technical or academic in nature. Little has been written about Irish dance in books aimed toward a more general readership. O’Connor takes up the task of conveying the great changes that have occurred not only since the success of Riverdance, but also within a span of more than a century’s worth of Irish dance culture and history. She wisely aims to focus on cultural politics and identities relevant to Irish dance and succeeds in maintaining a line of reasoning based upon critical cultural studies. Delving into an exhaustive amount of material, which occasionally causes her work to read like a doctoral dissertation, O’Connor summarizes the various ways that cultural politics manifest themselves through so-called “traditional” or “national” forms such as Irish dance.

O’Connor sets out to provide a social and cultural perspective that differs from those of her predecessors or contemporaries. Her work is written to be easily digested by a reader not intimately familiar with the dance form and seeks, in her own words, to contribute positively to the field of Irish dance research “by complementing and developing some of the themes already addressed by these scholars.” In the chapter “The Body Politic,” she begins with a socio-historical discussion of the Gaelic League and the origins of Irish dancing in the formation of Irish national identity. She subsequently moves forward in history to broach such topics as dance regulation and its national and postcolonial implications, the influence of dance halls and so-called “foreign” dancing on traditional Irish dance, and the effect of Riverdance on both a local and global level during the rise, and after the fall, of the Celtic Tiger.

O’Connor examines topics through the lens of cultural politics that, in the past, have primarily been examined in a purely historical or technical light. For instance, the author is well-versed in consumption culture, and she makes several enlightening connections between Irish dance hall culture of the 1930s to the 1950s and how it “ushered in new forms of identities for women in particular; identities that aspired towards and aligned themselves with the urban and the modern, and with an ethos of romance and consumption.” Any Irish dancer, or any scholar of Irish dance for that matter, knows that these categories of identity and economy have become increasingly relevant to dancers of both genders.

Later, O’Connor employs Riverdance as a gateway for an in-depth examination of post-millennial Irish dance culture. To better understand the legacy of commercial Irish dance shows with respect to globalization and cultural identity, the author interviewed several of the show’s dancers; she concludes that, “Global Irishness as expressed through dance has the potential to be mobilised for consumer capital through spectacle, sensation and technically brilliant entertainment. It also has the potential to break through the constraints imposed by the commodity culture and to be as genuinely creative, innovative, and exciting as the original performance...