2 days ago
Set dancing wheeling in new generation of participants
In the back room at Mary Mullen's bar in Galway city, three musicians with fiddle, mandolin and banjo are belting out music and around 30 young people, all in couples, are dancing.
Their energy and joy feel contagious. This crowd has just come from their set dancing class and this now is a freer, informal session, half class, half céilí.
Joe Gray and Ryan McKenna set up Galway Céilí Club last year. It is a set dancing club and it has taken off.
It is part of a wider revival of set dancing that is taking root among a younger generation in pockets across the country, including in Daingean Ui Chuis, Co Kerry and in Dublin.
What has happened to spark this new interest in one of Ireland's oldest forms of traditional dance, whose future just a few years ago as the country came out of the Covid lockdown looked most uncertain, even bleak?
"Last year myself and Ryan started Galway Céilí Club and the thing just kicked off out of nowhere," says Joe Gray.
"People really have a hunger for it, they really want to dance, they really enjoy it."
"I teach every Monday in the Cobblestone," says set dancing teacher Louise O'Connor "and from January of this year we have a lot of new people coming in".
"I think people are dying for something authentic and real to be part of, especially since Covid," she says.
Set dancing is different from céilí dancing.
It is derived from the quadrille, a courtly dance which spread from the ballrooms of Paris, and was adapted to local Irish music when itinerant dance masters brought it to rural communities in the 19th century.
Emeritus Associate Professor of Ethnochoreology and Irish dance at University of Limerick Dr Catherine Foley recounts the fascinating history of a dance that has survived against considerable odds.
It was deemed "foreign" by the Gaelic League. Decades later, it did not find favour with the new Irish state.
"There was a whole morality thing going on," Dr Foley explains.
"You have to remember, the church was very involved in the state and the notion of what or how you could dance was important, and how close can you dance with your partner, and how fast. It can't be wild, it has to be controlled," she adds.
However, set dancing continued to be danced in rural communities across the country, most especially in Munster, and now it is being discovered by a new generation.
