THE PRESERVATION OF IRISH DANCE

The preservation of dance has been a perpetual issue for practitioners and scholars, especially with regard to documenting present forms. Documentation, capturing the current as well as preserving the past, has drawn on a variety of mediums to assist in the conservation of these projects. My training as an Irish dancer from an early age inspired me to look at how Irish dance has survived for centuries, how it has evolved, and how it is currently being documented.

There are unmistakable limitations in attempting to capture a three-dimensional art form, primarily because the forms of documentation only exist in one or two dimensions. For centuries, Irish dancing masters traveled to various towns and villages to pass down the dances to future generations through live verbal and physical instructions. The majority of dancers learn visually, orally and kinesthetically, and having a live instructor gives the option of interacting with the teacher. But as time passes and the ability of original teachers to instruct all potential pupils diminishes, a second generation of teachers arises. This practice of transmission is not true preservation because variations emerge from the newer teachers; they are not strictly conserving the original dances. Many Irish dance historians have documented dances through words, but written words fail to capture all the characteristics of dance by documenting a three-dimensional art form in one dimension. Like dance preservation, music preservation has faced difficulties since the form to be saved is predominantly non-verbal.  The translation into a symbol-based music notation has preserved hundreds of compositions that would have otherwise changed or disappeared. In the same vein, older verbal traditions have more recently been integrated with symbol-based dance notation systems.

Labanotation, created in 1928 by Rudolf Laban, has been a highly promoted movement notation system that has been applied to dances ranging from 1930 to the present. Its popularity is due to Labanotation’s specific integration of rhythm, timing and music. The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance is renowned for its connection to the Dance Notation Bureau, the country’s center for Labanotation. OSU houses the Dance Notation Bureau Extension library that includes Labanotation scores folk dances for reference.

While Labanotation contributes to conserving numerous dances, today video is the most widely used form of documentation due to its accessibility and inexpensive production costs. Its ability to capture and replay moving pictures translates to a greater audience than the notation scores alone. The formats of video are constantly evolving, and currently most consumers and videographers are utilizing digital video (DV) due to its clarity of picture and simple transfer into the computer. The quandary that faces video documentation is that with every conversion to an alternative format— for instance from DV to VHS— there is another opportunity to lose information and accuracy.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the new technologies utilized by dance. documentors today. Dependant upon the viewer, the mode of documentation may not be easily understandable as in the example of Labanotation where a vast knowledge of the system is required to read a score. And although video is more comprehensible to a larger audience, it has the ability to limit transmission by the camera’s viewing choices or the quality of the footage. Therefore, in the field of dance documentation, it is preferable to use as many forms of preservation as possible to truly record the dance. Most current notation scores have supplemental materials, such as audio, pictures, or video if available, in order to assist the successful reconstruction of the piece. This interactive approach to preservation has become more popular in the last twenty years with the emergence of video and DVDs, where commentary has been added to enhance the knowledge and experience for the observer. For my master’s project I chose to document Irish dances that I have known and practiced for almost 20 years. Consisting of a Labanotation score of one dance, as well as an interactive DVD- video, my project reflects this current technique of dance preservation.

The traditional Irish dances I chose to document, including the Siege of Ennis, the Sweets of May and Trip to the Cottage, are currently performed by Irish dance schools throughout the U.S. and here in Columbus, Ohio. Having a background in Irish dancing, I know the Irish dance teachers and practitioners, am familiar with the style of the dances, and know when and where to capture video footage. Throughout my project I videotaped the Shanahan School of Irish Dance at their classes, competitions and performances. Like most documentors, I prefer to videotape so the camera work is unnoticeable to keep the viewers’ attention on the action of the dance itself. I also looked for the dances in any publications in which they were recorded (primarily journals and books) and contacted Irish dance historians and scholars for further insight.

As part of my research for this project, I traveled to Ireland during the fall of 2005 to speak with Irish dance scholars, practitioners and historians. I visited The Irish Dancing Commission’s offices in Dublin, which is the international Irish Dancing competition organization. At the University of Limerick I spoke to Irish Dance scholars at the School of World Music and Dance, the only academic institution in the world that gives a concentration in traditional Irish Dance.  There was also a meeting of Dance Research Forum Ireland, a new organization that concentrates on the preservation, education and advancement of dance and Ireland. The highlight of my trip, though, was being able to speak with Dr. John Cullinane, the leading Irish Dance historian, and look at his personal archives. His archives include photographs, letters of correspondence, judging books and other miscellaneous items all donated to him by friends and colleagues.

            Before going on my trip I realized that most of the people I would be meeting with agreed that documentation and preservation are extremely important. I was more interested in how the dominant figures and organizations in the field of Irish dance were currently documenting or preserving their work as well as their plans for the future. The need for an archive was made apparent in every conversation I had, but the main obstacle is where and how to house the archives. Should there be separate archives for each institution, organization or person? Do we make one archive for all areas of Irish Dance (e.g. competition, traditional, professional shows, academia)? Or should they collaborate to create one archive for Irish Dance, and if so, where would it be? These were questions I knew I would not be able to answer, but I knew I could contribute by beginning to study more about archiving as well as preservation and documentation.

Upon my return I got in contact with Nena Couch, the curator of the Jerome Robbins Theatre Research Institute at OSU to learn how to preserve formats outside of technology, such as papers, photographs and programs. It was through working with Couch that I was put in touch with the Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC), an organization committed to the preservation of dance, and whom I will be working with in the near future on other archiving projects. Though archiving has become a strong characteristic of my project, I wanted to remain focused on looking at as many mediums as possible, including the most used in dance— live performance.

In the beginning of April 2006, I presented excerpts of all of my footage from Ireland and Columbus, with live Irish dancers at OSU. I chose to take this opportunity to teach a diverse audience about the elements of Irish Dance as well as the current mediums being utilized to preserve the art form. This performance, presented with two fellow MFA dance candidates’ modern dance pieces, was an adaptation of the original dances by integrating projected video footage with featured live dancers from OSU and the Shanahan School of Irish Dance. A recording of the concert will also be included in the supplemental DVD for the Labanotation score.

I look at my project as being three separate parts that are consistent by themselves, but when integrated give a greater look into the world of Irish dance. One of my goals for this project was to not limit my projected audience by becoming too focused on a particular medium, and by infusing Labanotation, video as well as a live performance, most viewers found ways “in” for interpretation. In the future I plan to continue building my ties to certain organizations, such as the Dance Notation Bureau, Dance Research Forum Ireland, and the Dance Heritage Coalition, through continued education, conferences and additions of my own work to their libraries and/or archives. There have been other Irish dance scholars who have taken the first steps to documenting their work like myself, through Labanotation or video, but even these works are not always accessible. In the years to come, I look towards strengthening the connections between the worlds of Irish dance with other styles of dance. Dance, as an art form, should be documented and preserved so that it should, and will, live on in the future.

The desire to be authentic is admirable but unattainable when preserving dance— it is a performing art that lives only by one cast, at one specific place, and in one precise time. Any other performance differs by one or any combination of these factors, which alters the piece to a certain degree. But the aspiration to capture and relive this experience is necessary in order to document not only specific pieces in time, but also document history. It is far better to have a trace of a performance that was significant to the history of dance than to lose all evidence of its existence.

“Preparation” from the Siege of Ennis Labanotation score (2006).