The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities 1900-2000

CHAPTER TWO - The Body Politic: Dance and National Identity

18 CHAPTER TWO The Body Politic Dance and National Identity There is a scene in the film Some Mother’s Son (1996), set in Northern Ireland during the recent ‘Troubles’, in which a classroom of young girls are practising their step dancing. Their rhythmic foot movements are intercut with the movements of IRA volunteers preparing to launch an attack on a British army convoy. The close-up montage of dancing feet and loading weapons to the sound of Irish dance music builds to a crescendo and sets up a visual link between Irish step dance and nationalism. This link is the theme of this chapter, which traces some of the key elements and processes in its making. The chapter addresses the question of how dance became such a powerful marker of national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and outlines the efforts made during these decades to develop a canon of ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ dance that was seen as distinctively Irish. It is argued that the Irish dancing body was shaped in such a way that it could adequately reflect the body politic of the nascent nation-state. National and Folk Cultures The connection between dance and nationalism, militant or otherwise, is well rehearsed in the literature on Irish dance. The Gaelic Revival, the term now given to the cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Ireland towards the end of the nineteenth century, was characterised by the promotion of what were widely perceived to be distinctively Irish cultural practices. This was regarded as necessary preparation for the overturning of colonial British rule and the formation of an independent Irish state. The Body Politic 19 Irish revivalists were not alone in their concern to revitalise ‘traditional’ national culture and their project can be seen as part of a broader movement to promote the unique cultural heritage of many of the newly formed and emerging European nation-states. The intertwining of culture and politics in this way is well captured in the historian Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of a national ‘imagined community’. The community is imagined in the sense that bonds are created between members of this entity even though they do not know each other and for the most part will never meet. These bonds are established through the use of distinctive cultural symbols and practices such as language use, religious practice as well as other pursuits such as dance and sport. Indeed, for Anderson it was frequently the cultural element that preceded and gave birth to the political. Ireland seems to be a case in point, since the Gaelic League, the primary organisation of the Cultural Revival movement, was founded in 1893 almost thirty years before the establishment of the independent state. League members were strongly influenced by European thinkers on the connection between culture and politics and in particular on the role of culture in the struggle for political independence. According to Mo Meyer (1995, p. 29), the ‘educated Irish elite – poets, writers, artists, historians, philosophers and folklorists’ who founded the League knew of and participated in the international debates of the day. The philosophy and policies of the League were strongly influenced by German linguistics and by the theories of Johann Herder, Kuno Meyer and Wilhelm von Humboldt. The connection between culture and nation was strongly developed in Herder’s writing, believing as he did that each nation had a unique spirit that was expressed through modes of communication such as language and music as well as techniques of the body such as gesture, movement and dance. This unique spirit was captured in ‘folk’ culture, practised mostly by rural peasants, who were regarded as closer to nature and uncorrupted by modernity. Herder’s analysis, however, presents something of a paradox. Its ‘intrinsic dilemma’ as identified by Natasha Casey being that (2002, p. 19): the folk are enchanting to those already corrupted by society’s modernizing forces as they represent a connection to idealizations of the past when life was less ‘complicated’. However, the folk are also patently uncivilised, compared to those living in the modern, though corrupt, world. 20 The Irish Dancing: 1900–2000 The tension identified in Herder’s writing between the folk, seen as the bearers of tradition, and those who embraced modernity and innovation was to become strongly evident in the development of a distinctively Irish dance canon and was to re-emerge at various times throughout the...