Last week I wrote about why I choose not to get my TCRG, so this week I want to focus on what I’m doing instead. I talked about how the TCRG felt limiting to me, so what do I do with all this freedom as an independent Irish dancer? Having a TCRG wouldn’t necessarily prevent me from doing the things I’m doing now, but I do feel that, with limited time, and I am able to prioritize certain things that I may not have time for if I were focused on preparing young students for competition.
Let’s take my schedule from the past week, as an example, and some of the things I have coming up. It’s summer, so I’m a bit out of my regular routine, but things definitely haven’t slowed down.
- Last week started with an interview with Marilyn Moore, our DC-area céilí dance caller extraordinaire, as part of the research I am doing for a US mapping project by the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) coming out later this year. I got great insight into the DC-area céilí scene over the past 40 years or so and an even greater appreciation for what it takes to be a caller and cultural organizer.
- I jammed with my friend José André Montaño, a brilliant young jazz pianist currently studying at Julliard. He shares an interest in Brazilian frevo, so we met up for a couple of hours to try out some tunes together. He even improvised his own version of “Maid Behind the Bar,” adding a Latin jazz flavor to this classic trad tune. We were able to freely mix Irish, frevo, and samba for a fun afternoon of musical exploration, and we are hoping to develop this project further!
- I performed with Lilt at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival for a performance that was aired on Takoma Park Radio. I think this was the first time my feet appeared on the radio! Tina Eck and Keith Carr of Lilt are wonderful musicians who appreciate dance, so it was a really enjoyable performance. I am proud to say that I improvised the entire hour, something I would never have been able to do a few years ago. I credit this to all the sean nós jam sessions my group had together over the past year—and indeed, I organized them partly because I am so nervous about improvisation myself.
- I had a couple of concertina lessons and practiced almost every day! I took up the concertina just over a year ago because I have been preaching for years about how important it is for dancers to understand the music, and yet I hadn’t fully taken the plunge to learn a new instrument. Right now I’m struggling with how to incorporate rolls into tunes. I’ve been having a blast—it’s such a fun, quirky instrument.
- I met up with my friends at Wolf Trap for a picnic before seeing Riverdance! The show never gets old, and I still get goosebumps, especially when they throw the original footage up on the screen behind today’s dancers. It was great to see so many from our local Irish dance community show up in force.
- I called the Emerald Isle Club’s first summer pop-up céilí in Baltimore. It was a beautiful afternoon of dancing with the very best musicians in Baltimore, led by Billy McComiskey. I successfully called the Paris Set after a lot of studying!
- Through my nonprofit EducArte, I organized and led two days of workshops at the ClancyWorks Dance Educator Training Institute (DETI) in Catonsville based around the theme, “Dances of Resistance.” I co-taught with Yara Cordeiro from Abadá DC and we provided a series of workshops in capoeira, samba de roda, frevo, and Irish dance to demonstrate different approaches to resistance through movement, and I facilitated a group discussion about how we can take these themes into various classrooms. It was a really inspiring couple of days with other dance educators from K-12 schools, community colleges, and universities, and it was meaningful for me to share some of the pedagogical methods and teaching philosophies I’ve developed over my years as a student in various dance communities and from teaching in higher ed and independently.
- I started teaching my summer intensive, focused on steps pulled from archival dance videos found on YouTube—one of my favorite things to do! Not only do I love finding old (new to me) material, but I’m fascinated by how different the styles and rhythmic interpretations were just 30-40 years ago. We tend to think that Irish dancing has only evolved to become more difficult, but really we have just developed new techniques that may be impressive, but don’t make it any easier to recreate what was done by our predecessors. We only get good at the things we train, so I enjoy spending time training the styles we may not see anymore today. I learned a bunch of this archival material during the pandemic, so it has been fun to dig into those videos again to brush up on the steps and begin to share them with my students.
- I’m working on a few new projects with a few other individuals, but I won’t give too much away yet. These projects involve a couple of new choreographies, an archival recording project, a dance festival, and…a dance film!
This past week was maybe a little busier than I would normally be able to handle (okay, I barely survived), but look at the range! There’s some research, there’s new creative works and collaborations, there’s networking with educators from other fields and genres, there’s old stuff and new stuff. I can only imagine that, if I were an active TCRG, I would have spent this same period of time prepping students for the North American Irish Dance Championships taking place in Orlando this week. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course, and I wish those students and teachers the very best of luck! I will be watching the videos coming out of FeisTV with great interest. But being a part of that is not how I would prefer to use my time.
As exhausting as all of this may be, I feel energized by the breadth of possibilities. I’m using my brain and my body in different ways and connecting with people who think differently than I do. I can’t imagine the pressure of feeling like I have to stay within the confines of competitive Irish dance—not necessarily because of rules, but because of restrictions on time and expectations about how I should use that time. I don’t work full-time as an Irish dancer, even though it takes up 90% of my brain space, so I have to prioritize my time. I would be interested in knowing more about a day in the life of a TCRG, and I imagine there is some overlap. But I would also be interested in knowing if I’d be discouraged from doing any of the things I’m doing now, whether because of rules or expectations, or the simple need to prioritize other things.
