3 hours ago
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‘Irish dancing was completely different back in the day,” sighs veteran dance impresario Carole Scanlon, flipping wistfully through photos of tremulous adolescents clutching trophies in poorly lit community centres. A montage of grainy news reports backs her up: girls prancing in capes to a cassette backing of Ireland’s gravest fiddles; boys in middle-management waistcoats skipping across tiny stages; porridge-faced judges surveying it all in cufflinks and kipper ties.
“Back in the day” is a phrase that pops up frequently in Battle of the Irish Dancers, a three-part docuseries that follows a handful of eager young hoofers as they prepare for the annual World Irish Dancing Championships. The phrase refers, broadly, to the era before Riverdance, the global sensation that launched in the year of our Flatley 1994. The impact of the stage-based extravaganza on the trajectory of Irish dancing cannot be overstated. “It blew everything into a whole different ballgame,” says tutor and former Riverdancer Kelly Hendry, as we watch footage of Michael “Feet of Flames” Flatley’s ankles blowing a century of tradition into a whole different cocked fedora. And now? “It’s the wigs,” says Kelly. “They’ve taken over. Look.” We look. It’s the wigs, we think. They’ve taken over. Footage of Kelly’s pupils rehearsing for a “feis” (dance contest) reveals the extent of the hairy coup. Gone are the home perms of yesteryear. In their place are vertiginous turrets of synthetic curls; each wig an immobile tower bedecked with a Hobbycraft’s worth of spangly whatsits and diamante doodahs. They’re a “practical solution” says Kelly, allowing wig-ees such as 14-year-old best friends Maria and Saoirse to whirl, kick and clomp without being distracted by their own hair’s attempts to escape its moorings and sabotage their hornpipes. It works remarkably well, too, with the spray-tanned proteges seemingly oblivious to the horrors hovering above their scalps.
Watching Battle of the Irish Dancers’ cavalcade of wigs and tights reveals a curious truth; Irish dancers look more 80s today than they did in the 80s. It’s the combination of sequins and fixed grins.
What does Flatley think of all this, we wonder? Does His sateen blouse ever ripple with regret when He looks upon what He hath wrought? No idea. Other than the odd vintage clip from Lord of the Dance, the patron saint of modern Irish dancing receives nary a mention. Nor does the wider history of the dance get much of a look-in or, indeed, any facts or statistics that might offer an insight into its continuing evolution or global popularity. Instead, Battle of the Irish Dancers busies itself with the progress of its four young subjects and their teachers. The boggling footwork of Maria and Saoirse has earned Newcastle’s Kelly Hendry School of Irish Dancing a teetering shelf of trophies (“How does dancing make me feel?” muses Maria as she applies her third – fourth? – layer of eyeliner. “Undescribable”). In Birmingham we meet cheery 17-year-old Lauren, whose success at a pivotal feis sees a brief thawing of Carole’s wintry approach to coaching (“Good girl. You’re off the hook. FOR NOW”). In Dublin, meanwhile, we meet multi-award-winning Owen, who, at 26, is limbering up for his third and final world championship.
What else? Not much, really. It all trundles along at a pleasant-enough pace and everyone involved seems nice. Maria? Nice. Kelly? Nice. Carole? Terrifying, obviously, but still; nice. Then there is the dancing. Oh, the dancing.
This, we think, as we watch Owen’s clogs whisk themselves into a buckled blur, is essentially yodelling for feet: a majestic, preposterous lower-body hysteria that should surely be accompanied by its own laughter track.
It’s magnificent, gasp-inducing stuff. And yet the series seems intent on showing us only fleeting glimpses of the dancers’ routines, preferring to suddenly make everything speed up for no reason, or go all slow and woozy, or cut to another shot of Carole tutting as she makes herself a cup of tea. Frustrating? Undescribably so.
Still: we’ll always have the wigs.
