Fifty champion festival dancers have come together to form the dance troupe Core, challenging the Flatley-style domination of their art-form. Organisers hope that Core will demonstrate through showcasing and performances, just how vibrant and alive festival dance is in Northern Ireland.
Combined to form Core, the new dance company - with fifty champions drawn from fourteen schools right across Northern Ireland - aim to promote and preserve this exhilarating form of Irish dance.
In the Northern Irish form of the tradition, the personal expression of the dancer through movement and the narrative of music is what is most important. Northern Irish festival dancing has a strong ethos of accessibility and cross community participation at its core. It is a surprising yet supremely successful model of cultural integration. That tradition is now making its bid for wider local and international recognition.
Festival dancing celebrates each dancer’s unique style of movement and appearance which differs from the traditional which is more rigid and perhaps more familiar feis Irish dancing from which it formally separated over half a century ago.
Michael Flatley and his contemporaries popularised and repackaged a dance tradition - once seen as quaint - unfortunately in the process some of the expressiveness and individuality of this form of dance may have been lost.
Core’s artistic director and driving force, Dominic Graham, a man with 30 years teaching and performing experience feels that the time has come for festival dance to shake of its Cinderella complex and stake a place in the Irish dance world.
Conscious of Core’s genuine cross community appeal; Graham is passionate about the unique aspects of festival dance and the genuine variety that it brings to the form. “We haven’t really been taken seriously in the past by the Feis body, but then, we couldn’t or wouldn’t have taken ourselves very seriously either. Core is about lifting our standards, and down the line having the best teachers and choreographers so that the tradition can truly thrive.
“There are so many wonderful things about this kind of dance, but it's no hybrid form. It is absolutely purist. The Irish Feis tradition is all about technique – as many feet beats as possible. We also have that with festival dance, but it also involves heart and personal expression. And our use of music is very unique. As well as each dancer exploring the narrative of the music in their own way, we also compose our own music for set dances, which would be sacreligious to the Irish dancing fraternity. But the music is such an essential part of what festival dance is. Again, that sets us apart.“
Graham adds: “I think a lot of those big commercial shows we see are very robotic. They seem to be just big lines of robotic fast feet. It’s great to watch, of course, but there are other aspects of the dance that we like to highlight in festival dance. It is so easy for the whole dance form to get stereotyped.
He is keen to highlight the distinctiveness of Northern Ireland’s own brand of Irish dance, and can’t resist cocking a snook at the ‘big boys’ into the bargain. “There’s a real subtlety of style with what we do in festival dance; a real contrast of light and shade about the performances. It’s a storytelling medium essentially and centres around a narrative creating a mood and stage presence, which takes the audience on a dramatic journey. In the States for example, many people think Irish dancing is actually called Riverdancing! And we really need to change that.“
