Irish Dancing Builds Friendships

The joy of Irish dancing is best experienced through the faces of the dancers. As the youngest of six children, four girls and two boys, it was the girls in our family who were brought to Irish dance lessons on Sundays after Mass.  The dance lessons were about an hour away via subway and a long walk to the back of a bar in the Bronx.

The real lessons, though, were the ones we learned from meeting our fellow classmates and hearing their stories and struggles.  During the Irish dancing class my mother would catch up with the other mothers on the news from Ireland; marriages, births, deaths, the Troubles.  We would catch up on our steps, flirt with the handful of boys who took Irish dancing, and of course fret about an upcoming feis.Feis is Gaelic for festival and is where we would compete for medals and trophies. 

Irish dancing during the sixties was pre-Riverdance, pre-commercial and there were no wigs for the children, nor elaborate costumes.  After Riverdance everything changed.  For good or not, Irish step dancing gained credibility, prominence and ironically, its own international footprint.  

When I saw this video about a young Irish teacher, Caroline Duggan, a teacher at P.S. 59 in the Bronx, I was so excited.  Ms. Duggan taught her young, ethnically diverse students about Irish step dancing.

The video is a powerful reminder about the strength of one person and her ability to make an impact for good.  This story helped to demonstrate the power and richness of sharing a culture and infusing it with other cultures to show that there is much we have in common. Please watch the video and let me know what you think.