Heel to Toe, a showcase of traditional Irish music and dance, includes exhilarating kitchen dancing and mad polkas, writes Siobhán Long
'Around the house and mind the dresser." It was the kind of declaration that tickled our funny bones as children, but we never really understood its provenance. In our ignorance, we wondered whether it referred to some domestic athletic feats of Olympian proportion, or maybe it whispered of blind man's buff at Hallowe'en?
Fact is, it was the Donegal kitchen dances that sparked it all. Back in the bad old days when people's lives were so bereft that they didn't even have You're A Star to look forward to, of a Sunday. Miraculously, they managed to entertain themselves with the odd schlep across the kitchen floor, buoyed by the whoops and hollers of their neighbours and friends who queued up to step out in the heady confines of the kitchen (where the toastiest fires were lit and the strongest teas were brewed, and the hardiest hip flasks lurked close by).
Donegal fiddler Peter Campbell, son of the infamous Jimmy and nephew of Vincent, two of the finest exponents of the bareboned North West fiddle style, has basked in the belly of Heel To Toe/Barr go Sáil, a showcase of the best Irish traditional dance, over a sold-out three-night run in London's South Bank. He knows a killer combination when he sees one, and this mad melee of dancers and musicians from Donegal, Connemara and West Kerry has been kindling a renewed appetite for high-stepping in him.
"I just couldn't believe the reaction we got when we played in London," Campbell enthuses. "We were a bit nervous, because we didn't know whether they'd 'get' Barr Go Sáil. Would they be bored by the Connemara sean-nós dancers? Would they enjoy the kitchen dances? Sure, they were whooping and hollering like they'd grown up with it!"
Marina Rafter of the Dublin Dance Festival is the instigator of Barr Go Sáil. She commissioned Tom Sherlock to curate an evening of traditional dance and music as a finale to the 2004 festival of contemporary dance.
"It really was the first stage in an exploration into how Irish traditional dance and music has, if at all, informed contemporary dance practice," says Rafter. "In many other countries, folk dance tradition has had a strong influence on contemporary dance practitioners. This is probably most apparent in African and Asian cultures and in many cases they have very successfully fused the two traditions."
Sean-nós dancing has its fans - but it has its fair share of detractors too. While half the country has been swept away at one time or another on successive waves of set-dancing mania (coming to grips with a Clare set and discovering to their surprise, that this so-called traditional dance works wonders for their fitness levels, not to mention the adrenalin rush it offers), the notion of a solo dancer whose steps are accompanied by a seemingly random series of bodily contortions has found a far smaller fan base outside the stalwart Connemara territory where it's taught almost as soon as weanlings are, well, weaned.
Máire Áine Ní hIarnán was one of those whose cradle rocked to sean-nós, albeit in the US, where she lived until her teenage years. Her family's return to the west of Ireland was an excuse for her to literally dig her heels even deeper into the dance. "I think what I really love about it is that you go out there and you have fun with it", she offers. "There are no set steps, everybody can have a different style. The personality of the dancer shines through when they're dancing. This is body dancing, and you can put whatever you want into it. And a big part of the enjoyment comes from the reaction of the audience. Usually there's a lot of whoops and shouts during the dance."
Of course Seamus Begley, west Kerry box player and all-round court jester, whose wife Mary is one of Barr Go Sáil's dancers, was more than enthusiastic about early plans to bring a trio of Irish dance styles to the stage. "Growing up, there was no point in playing music unless there was somebody dancing", he declares. "You were only making noise. My music - these mad polkas - don't make sense unless there's dancing with them. We didn't have a lot of step dancers when I was growing up, but there was one man, Maurice Quinn, who was a lovely step dancer who danced the hornpipe, but no reel dancing. It was all either set dancing or hornpipes." Barr Go Sáil is the first in what Rafter hopes will be a series of incursions into traditional dance, where contemporary and traditional practitioners can collide to potentially dramatic effect.
"Barr go Sáil is the starting point of what we hope is an ongoing engagement with this concept", she suggests. "Post-Riverdance, a number of Irish dancers, including Colin Dunne, Jean Butler and Brendan de Gallaí, have begun to explore the contemporary dance route and are undertaking work that in some cases fuses the two traditions, or their contemporary work is influenced by their Irish step-dancing origins."
Barr Go Sáil/Heel To Toe is the final concert of this year's ESB Ceol Festival at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, tonight at 8pm. Featured dancers include: set dancers Dáithí Ó Sé and Mary Begley from west Kerry; sean-nós dancers Seosamh Ó Neachtain and Máire Áine Ní hIarnán from Connemara; and kitchen dancers Connie McKelvey and Ann Connaghan from Donegal. Musicians include Johnny Connolly, Jimmy and Peter Campbell, Seamus Begley and Jim Murray. For bookings, tel: 01-4170000