“What kind of Irish dance do you do?” I find that this question usually means, “Wigs or Riverdance?” or “In pubs or on stage?” or “Hard shoes or soft shoes?” Usually I start by feeling pleasantly surprised that people even know there’s more than one kind of Irish dance. But then I have to think about my answer. I might respond with the name of a practice or two: competitive step dance, sean nós, or country set dancing. Those names are useful because they help us find teachers, describe classes, and connect with other dancers. But they can also make Irish dance sound like a collection of separate boxes, each containing its own steps, music, and history. And I’ve always wanted to answer, with a bit of a question mark: “Well…I do all of it!?”
I recently introduced my prototype of an interactive Irish dance map as a way to explore the breadth of the field. Here, I want to share more about the thinking behind it. Why do we need a network of connections rather than a chart of styles?
My own understanding of Irish dance has changed considerably over time. Growing up in competitive Irish step dance in the US, I learned a particular vocabulary of movements, musical conventions, and expectations about technique. That experience gave me a foundation that I still proudly carry in my body. When I went to Ireland to study at the University of Limerick, I encountered a wider range of practices: regional “old-style” step dancing, sean nós, and festival style, as well as a handful of non-Irish dance cultures that gave me eye-opening perspective. Studying in Ireland helped me recognize diversity within a category that could appear much more homogeneous from my position in the diaspora.
This did not mean that everything I had learned was wrong. It meant that what I knew was situated. My experience belonged to particular teaching lineages, organizations, communities, and places. It was part of Irish dance, but not a complete account of it. That distinction matters to me as a teacher and organizer because I want to give people enough structure to understand what they are learning and seeing without suggesting that the structure contains everything there is to know. My map grows out of that tension.
From separate lanes to confluent streams
In 2023, I co-published a book with my friend and colleague, Sinclair Ogaga Emoghene, called Dancing in the World: Revealing Cultural Confluences. We drew on the striking image of confluences of water to think about how dance cultures meet and move through shared spaces. Sinclair is a dancer from Nigeria and, together, we wrote from our different cultural backgrounds and experiences, but our conversations revealed surprisingly similar perspectives and questions about belonging, cultural translation, and whose knowledge is recognized in academic and professional dance settings. Our confluence theory offers an alternative to imagining cultures as bounded objects that occasionally bump into one another. Dancers move—we carry steps, habits, histories, and aesthetic expectations into new environments throughout our lives. What we encounter can change how we dance, how we understand our practices, and how others perceive us.
But confluence also doesn’t mean that everything flows into one indistinguishable stream. In our book, we describe cultures flowing into and past one another: joining, influencing, separating, and adapting. Some streams are more dominant than others, and they continually branch off into new streams. Importantly, we caution against celebrating fluidity in ways that overlook cultural specificity. I want to balance making connections visible without implying that connected practices are the same.
Why a network?
A chart can help us distinguish things, but it becomes less helpful when it divides practices that are clearly related. You can see an image of one page (of about 10!) of my first handwritten chart below—it quickly became clear that columns and rows would not suffice. For this map, I wanted visitors to be able to enter through different kinds of questions. You can begin with a dance practice, but you can also begin with a shoe, a tune type, a movement, a word, or a setting. Each starting point reveals a different set of relationships. A leather-soled shoe does not identify one Irish dance practice. A double jig does not tell us everything about the dancing or its tempo. A competition setting does not encompass every way particular dance—for example, a jig or a traditional set dance—is learned and shared.
Additionally, no single practice serves as the permanent center and nodes are not listed in any kind of linear order that suggests one is more “developed” than another. Selecting a node temporarily brings its connections into focus, but another selection reorganizes the view. I hope that movement encourages a small shift in perspective: what seems central depends partly on where we begin. The relationship lines also need to be read. They are not all declarations of sameness or direct historical descent. Some describe central relationships; others mark possibilities, qualifications, or contested or ambiguous terminology. A shared feature can give us a useful question without supplying its answer.
One example is “battering.” In the map, battering connects to sean nós through solo rhythmic expression. It also connects to country set dancing through percussive footwork used for movement and rhythmic accompaniment. We could stop at the observation that both practices involve the same or similar battering patterns. But the more interesting questions are: What is the movement doing? How does it relate to the music? How does it function within the organization of the dance? What does this tell us about the dancer who practices battering at a céilí and incorporates that same footwork into their sean nós improvisation?
The shared vocabulary does not erase the distinction between the practices. Nor does the presence of a line, by itself, prove a particular historical route of transmission. It invites us to investigate the relationship more carefully. I see the map working alongside the confluences framework not by dissolving categories, but by asking what moves across them, what changes, and what remains specific.
Another example is festival style, which I encountered only after establishing myself as a competitive “feis style” dancer—a distinction I didn’t recognize at the time. Because of that experience, I have tended to present festival style as entirely separate from the practices associated with CLRG and other feis style organizations. Yet the more I study it, the more I recognize its affinities with Irish dancing of the 1950s and 1960s. Its notably slow slip jigs and solo set dances also deserve attention, but those distinctions sit alongside a substantial shared history. Festival style followed a different path in competitive Irish dance, just as Comhdháil and CRN developed distinct identities relative to CLRG.
This raises a question about the map: at what level should I distinguish these practices? Giving festival style its own practice node while grouping all feis style organizations together would apply different levels of specificity to related traditions. The stylistic differences between CLRG and Comhdháil may be less immediately apparent (though I know some would disagree!), but that doesn’t make them insignificant. A future version might distinguish these traditions more precisely. For now, grouping them within modern competitive Irish dance is not meant to erase their differences, but to put them on equal footing as we explore what they share and where they diverge.
Connections are not equal
There is another aspect of confluences that a network diagram can leave out: power. In our book, Sinclair and I are concerned not only with how dance cultures meet, but with the conditions under which those meetings happen. Who has to explain or translate their practice to others, and whose practices are mainstream enough to not need explanation? Whose aesthetic expectations organize the space? Which kinds of knowledge are recognized as rigorous, valuable, or innovative? The map doesn’t answer all of these questions, and making a decentralized layout does not remove historical or institutional inequalities. I am also making choices: I decide what receives a node, which relationships to include, and how to describe them. The map is an interpretation, not a neutral view from above. Its gaps and awkward categories are things to examine, not simply technical problems to hide.
And this is the point—the map is meant to invite debate and disagreement, which I believe is critical to the survival of a culture. If people don’t have strong opinions, it usually means they don’t care. So many dance forms, not just Irish dance, are filled with all kinds of origin myths and narratives riddled with historical inaccuracies. Rather than dismiss something because it hasn’t been “proven” or “supported by primary sources,” this map documents the ways that people feel about their culture, what they believe about themselves, and what they want people to know about them, even when they contradict themselves. This isn’t just history; it’s also anthropology.
What cannot fit on the screen
Ultimately, a map cannot contain the experience of dancing. It cannot reproduce the feeling of responding to a musician, the relationship through which someone taught you a step, or the accumulated familiarity of movement that has accompanied you through different parts of your life. In our book, I write about how steps connect me to my own history and to other people who carry them. Their meaning is not something separate that can always be extracted and explained; it emerges in the act of dancing. I do not want the map to replace that knowledge, but I do want it to encourage curiosity about it.
Have you checked out the map yet? Start with something familiar—a practice, a tune, a shoe, a word—and follow a connection you might not usually make. Read the qualification on a relationship line. Notice when a shared term means something different. Then ask what the map has helped you see, and what it has left out. For me, that is the purpose of this project: not to settle the boundaries of Irish dance, but to create another way of attending to the people, practices, and relationships through which it continues to take shape.
Learn more about Sinclair’s and my dance confluence theory at www.danceconfluences.com. We also produced an eight-episode podcast if you prefer to listen!
