Come dance!
the enchantment of dance, the contagion of joy
MAY EVE & Sclimpíní1
I once heard the writer Colm McCann say that every so often we should do something that ‘does not compute’. My recent solo trip to Leitrim for dancer Edwina Guckian’s2 May Eve celebration and reclamation of the joy of dance, of music, of song at a secret location was certainly one of those.
On Wednesday, 30th April, May Eve, we gathered in the car park of the Bush Hotel behind Carrick-on-Shannon’s Main Street, as we’d been instructed by email. We would be brought to a secret location by bus. We were not to bring our phones. The designated time of 7.30pm passed and there was still no sign of a bus. We chatted to each other, everyone wondering in a state of quiet excitement what would be in store over the coming hours. The delicious sense of anticipation was palpable; a secret location! Dancing! The subversiveness of it. One person took out a bug repellent aerosol and offered it around. I had forgotten something like this might be needed in a field in Leitrim at dusk. Obviously an amateur at this. When I revealed that I had travelled up especially for this, from the other Carrick3, a three and a half hour drive, a young woman asked if I often travelled for these kind of things. My response was a laughing, ‘not often enough!’
Then, as if part of that old joke, three buses arrived along together and pulled into the car park. We climbed on board to find all the windows obscured by newspapers secured with some silver adhesive tape. We were going on a real mystery tour! We chugged along country roads with reading material at our shoulders on ‘lamb finishers’ (sheep farming country) and ads telling of ‘what CBT can do for you’. On each seat there was an inch square piece of iron, with a hole in the centre. Mysterious. There would be instructions on this later.
We disembarked from the buses and were met by the actor Mikel Murfi, dark suited, standing in suitably dramatic pose. Then he silently led us over ditches and through a couple of fields. On the way a fiddler played lively music from a ditch, some lights glimmered and danced in the near distance, the sclimpíní leading us on. We walked on, careful of tufts of rushes and mindful of our footing on rough ground. Whenever I glanced up, the evening sun was an orange orb peeping through benign wisps of mauve/grey clouds. Everything was still, not a breath of wind, as we continued to wend our way to the dancing place under the Hawthorn tree.
And under the Hawthorn tree nothing would remain still.
The stillness was first broken by the sound of a man singing, a sound as if it rose out of the earth itself; deep, nasal, sean-nós. Then three slumbering female figures stirred beneath the tree, rose up and began to move in ever more free and wild dance. A musician took a fiddle down from the branch of the tree where it had been hanging and began to play, the singer took up a concertina and joined him. As the evening developed the dancing, music and singing became more and more playful, more physically abandoned, became a call-and-response, even ecstatic.
We sat around on straw bales on this May Eve in Leitrim, entranced. Above us the Norse goddess Friga4 had combed through the finest celestial silk and given us Cirrus. Dusk fell, the sun had set without us being aware. Now the sliver of moon rose as the dancers and musicians returned to their slumber under the May tree. Then Mikel Murfi stood up, said not a word, took off his coat and turned it inside out, put it back on again (that’s how you break the spell of the fairies) and silently led us out to the waiting buses. In my pocket I fingered a special folded sheet of paper, part of the web that had brought me here.
Come Dance…
In December 1990, Mary Robinson, in her inaugural Presidential address as the first female President of Ireland issued the stirring invitation to, ‘come dance with me in Ireland’. This was more than a call to dance, but to what dance represented.
The 1935 Dance Hall Act forced dancing into a controlled environment under the watchful eye of state and church where they ensured lots of room was left between dancing couples bodies for the holy spirit. Traditional Irish céilí dances only. No disrespectful foreign dances allowed. Set dancing being one of those foreign dances… Only 9 days after the 1935 Dance Hall Act became law, contraception was made illegal under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Both the Dance Hall Act and contraception ban came from the same Carrigan Report recommendations.
Source: Edwina Guckian (emphasis mine)
It is hardly coincidental that Mary Robinson, as lawyer and Senator, played a key role in the long and difficult struggle to have access to contraception made legal in Ireland. Her rallying call to ‘come dance’ in her inaugural speech resonated in 1990, gave a thrilling glimpse of what might be.
The folded sheet of paper I had in my pocket at that imaginative and magical dance session in Leitrim is an account, written by my late dad in 1994, of outdoor dancing at Piggott’s Cross in County Waterford in the 1930s and 40s, near to where I still live. He details the building of the wooden platform, made of tongued and grooved boards, with a small raised platform beside it for musicians. People loved dancing ‘Lancers’, he wrote, and also waltzes. He notes that the local priests weren’t at all in favour, and used their privilege from the pulpit to speak against it at Mass, one priest describing the girls who would go dancing there as ‘skibs, skibs, that couldn’t boil water’. In other words, not even fit for ‘domestic duties’, the true role of women. Remember, these were young women and men who by day, in 1930s rural Ireland, worked hard physically for long hours and still had the energy, joy and vitality to dance outdoors for several hours a couple of evenings a week.
Edwina Guckian reminds us that:
The 1935 Dance Hall Act is still an active law in Ireland today. If I were to hold a dance tonight in my local hall and hadn’t acquired a license, I could be prosecuted if they felt the need to enforce it. And it is enforced in certain situations all across the country, especially if the event doesn’t comply with today’s social norms.
And that inch-square piece of iron? This was to be used in case there was a danger of being so entranced by the fairy music and sclimpíní that we might cross through the portal to the ‘other world’. By looking through the hole in the centre we would have the power to resist the pull of the enchanters. I will keep it close by, in the hope to have need of it again in my future. That, again, I will be enchanted5 by creative spirits6.
Sclimpíní - translates as, ‘dancing lights before our eyes’
See my post, ‘Beauty, Wonder, Delight’, from March 2024 for my first introduction to Edwina Guckian and her joyful approach.
From Carrick-on-Suir on the border of counties Tipperary and Waterford, a half hour drive from the south coast.
With thanks to the work of Gavin Pretor-Pinney and his delightful book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide. Watch his TED talk at this link.
My hefty Chambers Dictionary tells me that ‘enchanted’ means to be acted upon by songs or rhymed formulas of sorcery.
The wonderful cast and team on the night of May Eve in Leitrim were:
Choreography: Edwina Guckian
Performed by: Edwina Guckian, Mikel Murfi, Stephanie Keane, Becky Ní Éallaithe
Musicians: Ultan O’Brien, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Laoise Kelly
So magical Margaret! I think the Irish have a special understanding on how to dance between two worlds of reality and mystery.
I confess I am insanely jealous of the Irish magic. We are far too dour, technical, and ambitious here in the States. We miss out on so much!