The impetus for the St. Brigid’s Dance Festival I’m launching in January was a piece of music and dance that made something I’d been thinking about come to life. In 2022, Donegal-based dancer and concertina player Caitlín Nic Gabhann composed and choreographed St. Brigid’s Day, a slip jig and set dance commissioned through the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) and Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs. The commission coincided with the proclamation of St. Brigid’s Day, February 1, as a national holiday in Ireland. Caitlín’s starting point was straightforward: St. Patrick has a well-known tune and set dance named after him, so why shouldn’t St. Brigid?
I loved the music and the choreography immediately, if for no other reason than that it was a heavy slip jig! Swoon. But what also struck me was how recognizable this new work was as part of a lineage of Irish traditional music and dance. It didn’t need to be generations old to belong. Here was a dance created in 2022, commissioned by the Irish Traditional Music Archive (“traditional” and “archive” being key words here), that drew on inherited knowledge while contributing something relevant to the present—that is, a creative recognition of Brigid through music and movement. It helped me imagine a festival where learning older material and creating new work all in one space could be understood as connected activities rather than opposing projects.
For me, these questions go back about fifteen years, when I was invited to teach festival style Irish dance at a DC-area event called “Local Old Style” that my dear friend Emily Oleson organized. It was a fantastic gathering that brought people from our region together to practice different Irish dance styles—specifically, I suppose, “old” styles. Besides my workshop, there was (country) set dancing, sean nós, and old-style step dance. In many ways, it offered exactly the kind of exchange I wanted more of. Having somewhat recently returned from my time at the University of Limerick, where I first encountered festival style, I was excited to share this new and unique dance style with friends here in DC.
I worked hard to prepare a workshop that I thought would be accessible to different levels, taking the different motifs I had learned from festival teacher Ruth Long while at UL. I felt it went well. However, later in the day, I heard that someone—or perhaps more than one person—had complained that festival style didn’t belong because it wasn’t “old” enough. I assumed they were responding to the higher leg lifts and balletic swoops and spins, which looked different from the close-to-the-floor battering associated with the other workshops. But the comment left me wondering what “old” actually meant. Because, in my view (and I had thought about this ahead of time, when proposing the workshop to Emily), festival style preserves a lot of the stylistic elements that marked Irish step dance of the mid-twentieth century, before it became so glitzy and globalized. Were we talking about historical lineage or an appearance that people had learned to recognize as old?
I also understood the criticism to suggest, less directly, that my workshop was too difficult. Some participants seemed to feel they needed a modern step dance background to do well, and that may have been true of the material I chose or how I taught it. That’s useful feedback for a teacher. But “this workshop needs a more accessible entry point” is a different criticism from “this form of dancing doesn’t belong here.”
I wondered, too, whether the objection carried some unspoken discomfort with a form associated with Protestant communities in the north of Ireland. Nobody said that directly, and I can’t know whether it played any role. But the possibility made me think about how ideas of belonging can carry assumptions about geography, religion, and identity, even when the language we use is simply “old” and “new,” or “traditional” and “non-traditional.”
That experience has stayed with me because studying festival style in particular has helped me reflect on what it means for something to seem both preservationist and forward-thinking. As I’ve mentioned in another essay, I see festival style as very traditional in the sense that the community has resisted the modernization of costumes, and the steps remain relatively simple, leaving room for more elegance and expression. But at the same time, festival style pioneer Patricia Mulholland (1915–1992) was all about bringing in other influences, like ballet and Scottish dance, to create an “Irish folk ballet” that reflected both traditional and modern storytelling.
So, I ask, is something like festival style really meaningfully less “old” than an old-style set dance or céilí dance whose creation preceded it by only a decade or so? Before making that comparison, we need to know what we are dating: the choreography, the technique, its documentation, or its emergence as a named practice.
Caitlín’s St. Brigid’s Day gives me a practical way to think beyond the opposition between preserving something old and creating something new, and I feel empowered by her work because it has been so widely celebrated by people and communities that I care about. I’m not sure I knew this kind of thing was even possible until a few years ago because I felt so boxed in by how “tradition” is defined in Irish dance. Here is a tune and dance composed in 2022 that is recognizable as part of an inherited idiom while contributing something new, commissioned by the stewards of Irish traditional music (ITMA) and aligned with the new St. Brigid’s Day initiative promoted by the Irish government. Its recent creation doesn’t disqualify it from being traditional; instead, it makes the creative process visible. We know who made it, when, and why. This seems obvious now, but I do feel we are in a new era of thinking about tradition. If it had been taught at the Local Old Style weekend, would people have complained that it wasn’t old enough?
My concept for St. Brigid’s Dance Festival, which will take place for the first time on January 30, 2027, grows out of these questions. We’ll learn Caitlín’s dance (with her enthusiastic permission!) along with other Brigid-themed dances, but the broader invitation is to explore not only what we inherit but also what we might contribute. That includes bringing older pieces back into circulation, being honest about where documentation ends and interpretation begins, and creating work inspired by older stories, ideas, and people, especially those who, like Brigid, may have received less attention over the years compared to other figures.
I’m already thinking that, in future years, I’d like to add a composition competition, a commissioning program, or a combination of the two, with youth and adult categories. I believe, of course, in looking first to Ireland for direction as it relates to Irish dance and music, but I also know how much great talent we have here in our region. I want to encourage people here to create tunes and dances within traditional idioms, with mentorship and support to develop their ideas. I feel there is a lot of fear and/or resistance to creating new things because we are so fixated on passing down tradition, that we sometimes don’t see that we are active parts of it. Sure, this creation process will require responsible mentorship and guidance, especially for youth—we can’t have people going too off the rails!—but I feel this could encourage the development of a unique flavor of Irish dance style here in DC. I think we can all benefit from feeling more freedom to be creative.
Postscript: This morning I was listening to Deirdre Scanlan on Tara Connaghan’s “In Tune With Tradition” podcast, and she described tradition as a box—one without any sides, bottom, or lid. It seems maybe a box isn’t the best metaphor if we have to think of it as, essentially, boxless, but it also makes perfect sense. Somehow we all know, more or less, where the boundaries are, but they’re constantly expanding and retracting and being tested. I’m hoping the St. Brigid’s Dance Festival can be a place where we, as a community, test the bounds of our own box of Irish dance tradition.
