30 years since Riverdance blew our minds and our 'holy f**ks' still echo'

Irish Daily Mirror

6 hours ago

IT remains a flame that will never burn low for anybody gifted a ringside seat for its mighty, ecstatic, hot-blooded, jaw-dropping, spine-tingling, seven-minutes-of-wonderment unveiling.
In truth, we were more than a little tipsy that night, yet even through that long-ago fug of alcohol, the wave of rapture that invaded the packed bar where we witnessed - stupefied, teary, a chorus of astonished "holy f***s" the only words we could summon - Riverdance being midwifed into the world remains as vivid three decades on as Michael Flatley's immaculately waxed chest.
It felt like a detonation of some new Irishness, a marriage of ancient dance and modern expression, something liberating and fresh invading both the evening and the heart with its riveting beauty, mesmerising a global audience of some 300 million.
Before writing this piece, to reassure myself my memory wasn't playing tricks, I re-watched Flatley and, first, Jean Butler thundering onto the stage at The Point Theatre on April 30th 1994, the interval act at the Eurovision Song Contest.
It is gobsmacking, electrifying, primal, emotional, an authentic "wow" moment that retains all its capacity to fire a lovely cascade of shivers down the spinal chord.
A cocktail of fiddles and bodhráns, the lead dancers owning the coliseum, alone under the klieg lights, a triumph of athletic movement, rhythmic tempo, exquisite balance and beguiling cadence.
Master and Mistress of the universe.
The urge then was to lock away the memory, retain it for the rest of time, the same compulsion that might overwhelm an art lover on encountering a renaissance master's brushstrokes hanging on the gallery walls of the Louvre.
At that moment it felt unsurpassable. Perfect.
Before it became a commercial behemoth - one watched live by more than 30 million people (five times the population of Ireland) at some 15,000 performances in 49 countries, selling over 10 million DVDs worldwide) - there was this. Just this.
A seven minute slot. A transfixed house erupting in spontaneous, orgasmic acclaim. An 'is this really happening?' sense of disbelief and awe.
And, as the camera pans to a breathless Flatley, giggling as he accepts the rapture of the audience, the vertigo of new possibilities opening dizzyingly before him, an impossibly youthful Gerry Ryan asking his audience a rhetorical question.
"What about that, stunning music, amazing dancing, was that or was it not the most spectacular performance you have ever seen?"
Few who had watched Flatley's feet move as if fired from the mouth of a howitzer were inclined to raise a dissenting voice.
Looking at it now through the telescope of all those years, Ryan's words don't feel remotely contrived or rehearsed, but, rather an instinctive and visceral response to something irresistible.
I was 25 years of age and Irish dancing was so far distant on the polar opposite side of the bandwidth to my interests that it might have existed on the dark side of the moon.
And yet, like half the nation, I was entranced by the orchestra of sounds and the sway of elegant, angelic movement. Flatley and Butler had carried the night into another dimension.
Our football team was in the long since vanished O'Dwyer's Bar on Dublin's Mount Street, celebrating a league title we had claimed that afternoon courtesy of our own exhibition of superior, Flatley-esque footwork (for some reason I still haven't figured we never toured the world, never had to fight off groupies, never made tens of millions, but, hey, them's the breaks).
The Eurovision was on in the background. Nobody was too bothered. Then Bill Whelan's score exploded into life and it was like every living creature in that bustling tavern had been hypnotised.
There was never a moment over the next 500 or so seconds when our attention was allowed veer from the TV screen. It was that good, that instantly stimulating, dance as mainlined narcotic, a mood-altering Celtic opiate.
Sense of place played a significant role in the elemental ache of joy.
It was one of the few times since Italia 90 four years earlier that I had felt that sudden surge - call it patriotism, call it a sense of belonging, call it pride in our heritage - that fills a room to the brim with something I can only describe as heartsoar.
We embraced and emoted as we had at the end of the game a few hours earlier. I think there might even have been an eruption of the dreaded Oles. It was a slightly self-conscious way of trying to mask the fact that we were all on the verge of sobbing.
It really was that powerful.
There we were, a group whose preferred music ranged from The Jam to Bowie to Ska to The Stones, incontinent with emotion because of something we might have scoffed at ten minutes earlier.
We were in our native city, yet for some reason the lyric that best describes how I felt in that moment comes from U2's A Sort of Homecoming.
"For tonight, at last/I am coming home/I am coming home."
So many of those Eurovision interval slots tend to be twee and insecure, but here was an exhibition of rip-roaring Irish self-confidence. A visual, aural, comfortable-in-its-skin feast of excellence.
A year later, Riverdance went on the road, and it is that 30th anniversary landmark that was celebrated this week at The Gaiety and at various afterparties that ran long into the night.
A confession: I have never been to the full show and never felt an urgent need. In some perverse way, I find the vast global ATM - churning out dollars and yen and all the currencies of the world - into which it has transformed, slightly off-putting.
But, we'll always have O'Dwyer's.
The emotions awakened by that seismic seven minute rumble in 1994 were sufficiently pure to last a hundred lifetimes.
Its innocence; the bone-shaking delight of Flatley hot-footing across the floor with manic, charismatic glee; Butler's effortless elegance and natural-born class; the blur of feet; the way the music hit you beneath the rib cage; the astonishment as we observed the birth of something magical and, the way it made us all feel...it all remains gloriously evocative.
Ireland would win the Eurovision that night - back then, as invincible as a team co-managed by Jim Gavin and John Kiely, we almost always won - courtesy of Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington performing Rock 'n' Roll Kids.
Harrington watched the interval act from backstage and still recalls how the arena convulsed.
"That night," he says, "felt like the beginning of the roar of the Celtic Tiger and I was right at the epicentre."
Riverdance became a synonym for excellence, for a slightly mythical Irish form of self-expression, a way of articulating a cultural moment that triggered a wash of reverence.
Liam Griffin, the messianic and erudite Wexford manager who led the county to a first All-Ireland title for 28 years in 1996, lovingly depicted hurling as the "Riverdance of sport."
His poetic description was both arresting and apt.
Here were two uniquely Irish forms of cultural expression, both dances, one using feet, the other a sliotar and a wand of ash, each seeming to eloquently express a powerful sense of Irishness.
In their liquid movement, their natural flow, Cian Lynch or Patrick Horgan or TJ Reid might well be riverdancing.
A great hurling match is both a spectacle and a feeling. It finds your gut. It lifts you to a place of brighter light, this tumultuous choir of stick and ball and galloping athletes. At its best, it dresses itself in a cloak of myth.
As Flatley and Butler did all those years ago.
On Anna Livia's banks, they danced their dance and the ancient river was not alone in nodding its damp, splashing head in approval, in understanding it had witnessed the shifting of Irish art to the highest ground.