Musings

Irish musicians and dancers don’t always clash, but decades of competition-focused training have created a real divide between us. We literally hear and feel the tunes differently: step dancers often treat music like a metronomic grid to conquer, while sean nós dancers move within the living pulse of a session. Musicians may dismiss dancers as “lacking theory,” and dancers feel reduced to gimmicks. These tensions—and their roots in hierarchy and training—deserve honest, mutual translation and repair to create more welcoming, productive spaces for Irish traditional music and dance.

Irish dance emerged from Ireland’s anti-colonial struggle as a disciplined, rule-bound “dance of resistance” designed to counter stereotypes of the Irish as wild and undisciplined. Over time, that strategy succeeded in legitimizing Irish dance but also narrowed ideas of what Irish dancing can be, leaving dancers like myself feeling constrained. Drawing on comparisons with Brazilian frevo and capoeira, I argue that Irish dance’s deeper power lies in “aggressive joy” found in freer social spaces, and I call for embracing many ways of being an Irish dancer to discover new strategies of resistance for this dance form.

Last week I wrote about why I choose not to pursue my TCRG, so this week I want to focus on what I’m doing instead with that choice. The certification never felt inherently negative, but I feel that its demands may narrow my time and attention toward competition prep in ways that do not align with how I most enjoy working. As an independent Irish dancer, my calendar is full of research, performances, cross-genre collaborations, and other community events that pique my curiosity as much as they stretch my stamina.

I spent years preparing for the TCRG exam, only to step away just when I expected to sit down for it. A year at the University of Limerick showed me a wider Irish dance world—sean nós, festival style, regional old style traditions, and contemporary work that doesn’t fit neatly into competition structures. Choosing not to get the certification has meant less status in some spaces, but more freedom to build inclusive, participatory communities that better align with my philosophy as a teacher and performer. The TCRG is one path, but one that feels too limiting for all that I want to experience and share as an Irish dancer.

Céilí dancing has always been where I feel the pure joy of Irish dance most intensely—the sweat, the spinning, the endorphins, the feeling of being enveloped by live music and the people around me. As competitive training has taken center stage, many young step dancers are barely exposed to this social side of the tradition, or are subtly discouraged from it. Here I reflect on bouncy “hoppers” and smooth “gliders,” and ask how we can honor regional styles without dimming anyone’s light—or their instinctive response to a great set of tunes.

When a step is drilled into your muscles and memory over years, does it still belong to the teacher or school you learned it from, or does it become part of your own embodied history? I ask how we might honor attribution and protect material without cutting off the continuity and shared ownership that keep the tradition alive.

I have been reflecting on what it means to feel like a cultural insider vs. outsider, and how that shapes my understanding of ownership and protection in the traditional arts. I explore why competition in cultural arts spaces can feel so fierce, and how insecurity and scarcity mindsets can limit us.

Irish dance contains multiple styles, each shaped by different histories, regions, and communities, and those differences matter to how we learn, teach, and perform today. I reflect on how festival, competitive, and “old style” forms have been defined and policed, and how dancers navigate expectations about what “counts” as real Irish dance. I ask what it might look like to honor these lineages while also making space for experimentation, hybridity, and dancers’ own evolving relationships with the tradition.

When I came up with my new mini-slogan, “There are many ways to be an Irish dancer,” it came from many, many years of trying to figure out where I want to position myself in this wonderful, complex world of Irish dance. A slogan is one thing, but explaining the decades of experience and lessons that led to it is another.