The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities 1900-2000

CHAPTER FIVE - Return of the Repressed? Set Dance, Postmodernity and Community

80 CHAPTER FIVE Return of the Repressed? Set Dance, Postmodernity and Community A flyer advertises a dance holiday in the Spanish island resort of Ibiza, famed for its disco dance clubs. This particular holiday promises ‘Sun, Sand, Sea and Sets’ and invites the reader to ‘join us for the “Craic” in Ibiza’. The set-dance holiday, scheduled to take place in April 2002, was an event in the fifth Fleadh España and provides a good illustration of the popularity of set dance in Ireland at this time.1 Apart from the holiday abroad, there were many other opportunities for set dancing in cities, towns and villages all over the country. These included classes, set-dance céilís, pub dancing, setdance weekends, as well as week-long summer schools, most notably the Willie Clancy School in Miltown Malbay, County Clare (see figs 13 and 14). Why did this dance genre, once the most common dance form in rural Ireland, become so popular again fifty years later? And furthermore, was set dance in its more contemporary incarnation ‘reinvented and re-contextualised in response to social and cultural change’ (Snape, 2009, p. 298)? This chapter contends that the increased popularity of set dance between the 1970s and the mid-1990s reflected significant changes in Irish society, changes that were to affect people’s sense of embodied identity, as well as the nature and quality of their relationship to others. The discussion revolves around a consideration of the social and cultural climate of the revival era as well as conversations with dancers about their enjoyment of set dancing. The main argument put forward in this chapter is that set dancing provided participants with a particular sense of community. I use the term ‘community’ to refer to the informal relationships that dancers build up through set-dance practice, which generates ‘a special sense of Return of the Repressed 81 communion or commonality that is derived from their shared interests ’ (Tovey and Share, 2000, p. 336). I suggest that this dance form, historically associated with the geographical communities of rural Ireland, was a manifestation of ‘cultural stability and continuity ’ (Buckland, 2001, p. 1) and for some a nostalgic search for the idealised values of these disappearing places. Equally importantly, it is claimed, the community generated through set dancing was a new kind of community and expressed a desire for some of the freedoms of urban living as well as a resistance to its constraints. Changing Society, Changing Communities Set dancing, which had been the most common form of social dancing for almost two centuries, had suffered a general decline in the 1930s, though the tradition was kept alive in a few places, most notably West Cork, Kerry and Clare. According to Tubridy (1994) the causes of the decline were multiple and included rural migration, clerical hostility, the creation of, and an increasing popularity of, an alternative ‘authentic’ canon of Irish dance both before and after national independence in 1922, the suppression of house dancing following the enforcement of the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935 and, finally, increased prosperity leading to changing patterns of consumption. However, the early 1970s saw the ‘return of the repressed’ in the form of a revival that gained momentum over the next two decades and was flourishing at the time of my own research in the mid-1990s. The set-dance revival coincided with an era of rapid social change in Ireland. Both the 1960s and 1970s saw a number of major national developments that were to open Ireland up to outside economic , political and cultural influences. At a cultural level, the renewed interest in Irish music and dance can be understood as part of the general folk revival in the 1960s as well as the establishment of a national television station, Teilifís Éireann, in 1961. At an economic and political level the Lemass–Whitaker policies exposed Ireland to outside economic influences, including joining the European Economic Community in 1971. The awareness that Ireland was now becoming part of a larger world led to a renewed interest in Irish traditional culture and the values and ways of life associated with it. For some this interest was motivated by a fear that Ireland’s national culture might be swamped in a larger union of 82 The Irish Dancing: 1900–2000 European states, and for others it was seen as an opportunity to bring a unique national cultural...