The Brooklyn Rail

If the pandemic gave us one thing, it might be a reminder to deeply appreciate every in-person gathering. This struck me while watching Jean Butler’s What We Hold, which unites a varied cast of all ages, skilled in a range of dance genres (but all in Irish step on some level). The performance is “a promenade dance piece,” where the audience, guided gently by Butler, moves between spaces at the relatively new, handsome Irish Arts Center building in Hell’s Kitchen. We were quite close to the dancers most of the performance, and thus were able to sense the most subtle muscular move, or the irrepressible smiles that crossed many of their faces while executing the propulsive phrases. It was impossible not to smile back.

The show began with an intense drill session by James Greenan, looking athletic in a casual tank and shorts and traditional hard step shoes with a bit of a heel. He faced away from us, toward two full-length mirrors at angles so we could see his front, but his well-muscled calves and fleet footwork demanded attention. He tapped on a small, sprung platform, which flexed as he pounded away for more than ten minutes, unspooling phrases with slight rhythm shifts and emphasized counts. The sheer sparring attack and speed of his footwork dazzled, and we could see him counterbalancing the lower body’s action with torso twists and reactive arm movements quite apart from the traditional rigid arm positions associated with the style.

We then saw Colin Dunne—one of Butler’s old partners from Riverdance—playing with balance and step variations on a small dais as Butler stood apart, watching him intently, creating an invisible force field between them. Led to another space, we sat around a catwalk where Kaitlyn Sardin and Maren Shanks posed in fourth position, bodies twisted slightly; Butler joined them. They moved slowly and deliberately through a series, pivoting and smoothing the backs of their hands down their backsides, evoking fashion models with their cool disconnect. Spoken reminiscences of studying dance played—of climbing the stairs to the studio, or loving it because it provided a great diversion—snippets from Butler’s ongoing archival project, Our Steps, Our Story: An Irish Dance Legacy Archive, in partnership with the Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library. The overlaying of these memories on top of the physical vocabulary intensified the immersion into Irish dance.

After being herded into the larger space and seated in semicircles facing a DJ (Ryan Seaton), the ensemble gathered on stage, some in socks, others in hard leather shoes or ghillies. The young Maren Shanks, in ballet-style laced slippers, made laps around the space in triplets, her long hair flowing in rhythm behind her. Others moved in modern dance passages, fluid but with some formal positions adding structure. Butler showed some of her incredible skills, evoking her Riverdance days in hard shoes on a wooden platform, delivering rapid, quicksilver, and precise tapped steps. (Indeed, it’s somewhat mind-bending to reconcile this Butler with her younger self—a huge star billed alongside Michael Flatley during Riverdance’s boom, recorded for posterity in video clips from major talk shows.) She and her old partner Colin Dunne performed a space-eating duet with knee-crossing kicks, leaning on one another at moments.

Cast elder Tom Cashin shed his man-on-the-street image, summoning some admirable Irish dancing from earlier years. The group split in half, and working the same phrase facing different ways, overlapped and ebbed hypnotically. Several of the dancers beamed at the velocity, precision, and unity of the movement, and we felt this joy. They clustered and on cue, raised their arms in release, emitting some “woos!” before doing their own freestyle dance. Hardly wild compared to many contemporary dance performances, but in contrast to the tightly wound technique of Irish step, crazy.

The way Butler chose to break the evening into differently-located scenes enriched the experience immensely. The viewing aspects for each of the three settings varied, disorienting us, disrupting a sense of complacency, and making us re-tune with each change. And in a sense, it made us a part of the show, often facing the other half of the audience in addition to watching the performers. It also reinforced the concept of the passage of time, so salient when discussing a dance form that has endured centuries and continues to evolve. The breadth of dance experience contained in Butler’s being alone spans many decades, and it’s remarkable to see how keenly she has adapted.