Last week, I co-presented a series of workshops at the ClancyWorks Dance Educator Training Institute (DETI) on the theme of “dances of resistance,” including Brazilian capoeira, samba, and frevo, along with Irish dance. Unless you know me, it may seem random to throw Irish dance into the mix, but there are good arguments for considering it a dance of resistance. Irish dance as we know it today was born out of Ireland’s anti-colonial independence movement and coincided with the urgent need to build a positive national image after centuries of British oppression, as well as religious repression. My understanding is that the dance is so rigid, disciplined, and conforming because the Irish were portrayed as the opposite of this—wild and untamed.* While Afro-Brazilian dances like capoeira and frevo (and many African diasporic dances) tend to adopt strategies of resistance that involve instability, unpredictability, resistance to definitions, and subversive satire, Irish dance does the opposite. It not only adopts the European aesthetic ideals of verticality, symmetry, tension, and rule-following, but it takes it to the extreme, as if to say, “You think we can’t be disciplined? We’ll show you what discipline really looks like!” while performing with military precision, arms held firmly at the sides, and nary a smile to be found.
Through nearly two decades of research on dances of resistance, I’ve learned that resistance in dance takes many forms, and my interest is not just in how these dances can be used as tools of direct action protest, but how they comprise entire communities that are created and maintained by strategies intentionally designed to shape how they move, what they believe, and how they interact with each other and the outside world. These strategies are imbued in every movement detail—every tilt of the head, angle of the foot, and swoop of the arm—to train their bodies to follow particular behavior patterns and, in so doing, express a particular worldview. For dances of resistance, this worldview is created in opposition to other worldviews, often those that are a direct threat to the community in question.
Looking at its history in anti-colonial and postcolonial Ireland, Irish dance fits this description. But sometimes I question whether this was the best strategy in the long run. On the one hand, the rebranding of the Irish image over the past 100 years has been largely successful. For Irish dancers specifically, we are still subject to caricatures depicting us as drunken leprechauns and fighting Irish, but, for the most part, Irish dance is seen as a legitimate art form, or sport, depending on how you look at it. But, as I have been writing about over the past few weeks, we are now stuck in this space where Irish dance feels extremely limited. The vast majority of people worldwide think there is only one way to be an Irish dancer, or maybe two: the wig-wearing competitive dancer, or the Riverdancer. And because of the rules created by the Irish dance hegemony, those of us wanting to break free struggle to find a place. Not only is it difficult to free your mind enough to even *envision* other ways to be an Irish dancer, but it’s even harder to find spaces, resources, and other people who want to join you on that endeavor.
I’m reluctant to blame the early twentieth-century Gaelic League and An Coimisiún for all of this. Again, I understand this resistance strategy, and I think it worked for the moment that it was created for. For all its imperfections, this strategy promoted Irish culture in a positive light, contributed to the cosmopolitan nation that Ireland is today compared to 100 years ago, and it led to the creation of something beautiful, something that has shaped my life in significant ways. But if we can move on from 1920s Ireland, I’m not sure why we’re still holding onto this strict adherence to rules. The tension and rigidity are apparent in our physicality—you can see it as a spectator, and we can feel it as dancers. Now, I believe that we find a certain freedom in extreme discipline, and it is not a bad thing to strive for perfection, as long as we know it’s not attainable. And it feels exhilarating to bang out a rhythm or fly through the air with the focused technique that we have trained for years. But so many dancers get to a point where that rigidity just doesn’t feel good anymore, and rather than feel liberating, it feels restrictive. And that’s when so many of us just quit, because it seems like there aren’t any other options.
Reflecting on my own trajectory, I didn’t really start to gain the courage or the perspective to envision (or embody) other possibilities in my dancing until I started training in frevo dance about 10 years ago, after training in capoeira for about 10 years prior to that. Frevo’s history is far removed from Irish dance’s history, and yet there are certain parallels. I always describe frevo’s resistance strategy as rooted in “aggressive joy”—further disguising the disguise of the fight that is in capoeira’s beautifully tricky, cunning movements, and dancing with ecstatic, breathless joy, showing people just how happy you can be, especially when they try to take that joy from you in systematic ways. Around the 1950s, frevo started to become more codified around a more formalized pedagogical method, rather than just danced in the streets. Part of this formalization was in an effort to form a regional identity and show that these dancers had technical skill and were not just “improvising” (used in a pejorative sense)—so this led to more discipline, which led to more rigidity, verticality, and two-dimensionality, as opposed to the loose, three-dimensional style found in the (yes, often drunken) streets of carnival.** Does this sound familiar? Today, there is “stage frevo,” which is the more vertical, performative style, and “street frevo,” which retains the original spirit of carnivalesque resistance.
What I appreciate about today’s frevo community leaders, many of whom I have spoken with at length, is that they have made a point of ensuring that frevo’s resistance is not forgotten—not in the narratives that are told about the dance, nor in the movement itself. Frevo’s central philosophy of resistance is maintained at the community level, as well as the institutional level. If you visit Recife’s Paço do Frevo (a museum entirely dedicated to frevo), not only will you learn about the dance’s roots in capoeira, but you will see exhibits that strategically represent a wide variety of individuals, bodies, and stories from past and present. When you take a class with any of the leading groups, even the top city-sponsored school that mostly performs stage frevo, teachers will emphasize the importance of “munganga,” or the ability to mess up and keep going by making it look intentional, over any specific movement technique. This is part of their resistance to becoming too codified, preparing the body to deal with unpredictability and injustice in a dangerous, inequitable society.
I find that Irish dance tries to hold onto its resistance narrative by repeating origin stories about holding our arms at our sides because of British soldiers or Catholic priests. Students hear this early on, and there are plenty of AI videos going around these days that repeat this simplistic narrative. The ethnographer in me does enjoy a good origin story, regardless of how historically inaccurate it may be, because of what it tells us about how a group of people understands itself and wants to be understood by others. But, unlike frevo, the aggressive joy that I believe is also at the root of Irish dancing has been mostly suppressed through its institutionalization. Maybe this is because frevo is still largely danced in the streets while competitions and formal performances are relatively less common, whereas Irish dance in truly free social spaces is hard to come by. As much as we may talk about Irish dance as resistance, it is not something that we train our bodies and minds for. We train conformity.
As I’ve written previously, my most aggressively joyful moments with Irish dancing have been at barely organized house céilís and crowded sessions on beer-sticky floors. These moments had nothing to do with the disciplined national resistance that propelled Irish dance into the global dance form that it is today, and, in fact, they happened in spite of it. I am able to dance because I’ve trained, but I also wonder if my journey would have had less angst if I had been encouraged to improvise a little more, or allow myself to be okay with my imperfections and turn my mistakes into new possibilities, or create my own spaces for dancing where we can feel a little less restrained.
As dancers, how do we balance discipline and training with freedom of expression? Do we still need Irish dance as a resistance strategy for building a nationalist, postcolonial Irish identity, or is Ireland past that? If not, then what makes a dance Irish? Is resistance more powerful when it is centralized, or are there more opportunities for subversive resistance through decentralized action? Is it selfish privilege to be able to run off and use Irish dance for our own personal resistance?
Irish dance is often viewed by outsiders as a “cute little folk dance,” or, at best, a serious sport fixated on discipline and regulations—hardly the poster child for resistance. And yet, like anything else, it is shaped by ever-changing national politics and global economics that we, as dancers and community leaders, have to navigate. Even capoeira, as the most near-perfect example of a dance of resistance that I can think of, struggles with maintaining its core philosophy of decentralized resistance (arising from quilombo communities) amidst global capitalism and the need to legitimize itself as an organized network of schools, methodologies, graduation systems, and tradition bearers. Perhaps Irish dance’s centralized organizations have a point—if we don’t participate in its nationalized expression and instead leave to create our own communities, then we’re neglecting this history of resistance and weakening its power. But, even as I write this, I know this can’t be true, if only because of the number of dancers past and present who have contributed to Irish dance in significant positive ways, but have been intentionally written out or excluded by the central powers that be.
I’ll say it again—there are “many ways to be an Irish dancer.” I believe that the more we as a community open ourselves up to accepting this, the more we will uncover as-yet undiscovered resistance among us, throughout history and today, that will only empower us to tap more into our aggressive joy.
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* The racialization of the Irish is a topic for another day, and I can provide an in-depth bibliography for those interested in a nuanced perspective.
** To learn more about the formalization of frevo in English-language writings, check out frevo.thekatespanos.com/resources.
