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

Critical scholarship about dance practices in Ireland has taken some time to gather momentum. This is perhaps unsurprising, considering that dance has yet to be established as a discrete subject of study at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education.¹ Yet despite the neglect of dance studies in Irish academia, the past decade has seen the emergence of a growing number of publications that are forging space for much-needed discussion. This new wave of scholarship has been supported by several important infrastructural developments in the dance research landscape, such as the founding of Dance Research Forum Ireland in 2003; the advent of increasingly regular symposia dedicated to dance scholarship supported by festivals and organizations such as Galway Dance Days, Dance Limerick, and Dance Ireland; and the establishment of the National Dance Archive at the Glucksmann Library, University of Limerick, in 2011. Publications that are contributing to the growth of the field include work by dance scholars/practitioners looking at various aspects of historical and contemporary dance practices and performance in Ireland, such as questions of identity in contemporary dance education (Roche 2011), the autobiographical body and somatic practices in dance (Meehan 2011), and the intersection of dance and politics in Irish dance theater (McGrath 2013). Another strand of scholarship includes research conducted through sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic lenses that investigates the historical and current practice of traditional Irish step dance and social dance forms. Publications in this area include sociological analysis of the development of step dancing and social dancing in Ireland from the Middle Ages to the present (Brennan 1999), ethnographic study of the expression of Irish national identity and cultural memory in dance (Wulff 2007), anthropological analysis of the role of competition in Irish step dance (Hall 2008), and cultural analysis of the globalization of Irish step dance through commercial productions such as Riverdance (Monks 2007). This flourishing interest in, and practice of, critical dance scholarship is coinciding with a (belated) awareness of the serious lack of attention that has been paid to corporealities in research on Irish culture. Barbara O’Connor’s work acknowledges this neglect within the field of sociology and cultural studies (5) and aims to contribute toward redressing it.

O’Connor presents The Irish Dancing as an examination of “the role of dance in Irish cultural politics and identities in the twentieth century” (1). This rather broad title and aim actually has a quite narrow focus in terms of dance genre, with the dance discussed limited to different manifestations of Irish step dance and ballroom dancing. Apart from a final chapter on commercial step dance shows (e.g., Riverdance), the book focuses on dance in social and recreational settings, with the seven main chapters each addressing a different form of cultural identity construction: “national, ethnic, gender, social, class, postmodern, and global” (7). An aspect that sets O’Connor’s book apart from previous sociological studies of traditional step dance and social dance in Ireland is the integration of some dance studies scholarship in her analyses, although it must be noted that there are few references to post-1990s publications. Her citation of Jane Desmond’s observation in 1998 that “dance remains a greatly undervalued and under-theorised arena of bodily discourse” (Desmond in O’Connor, 5) certainly continues to be relevant in an Irish context; yet international developments since the 1990s make this reference relatively dated in a broader context.

The first three chapters serve to cover familiar and well-rehearsed terrain in the field. Chapter 1 outlines the book’s methodological underpinning, which O’Connor describes as a “critical cultural studies approach [that is] embedded in a broadly sociological frame” used to conduct an “investigation of the links between social, economic and political power with the production/performance and representation of dance in an Irish cultural context” between 1900 and 2000 (7). A discussion of the “Irish body style” and...