Riverdance, the theatrical show featuring Irish music and dance, has become a global phenomenon, but few people know its roots in centuries-old protest dancing against British colonization. Photo via AP/Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Dance

Dance as Protest, from Ireland to the Levant

CAS class studies how dancing preserves oppressed cultures

Last spring, students in California danced a traditional Middle Eastern dabke to protest Israel’s Gaza offensive after Hamas attacked the Jewish state. In moving feet to music, they channeled a centuries-old practice, spanning continents, of people dancing to celebrate, and sometimes preserve, their cultures.

In a recent session of her course Folkdance as an Expression of Resistance, Abir Ward, a lecturer in the College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program, led her students through another example—Irish protest dance—and its recent morphing into something very different: the spectacle-laden global blockbuster Riverdance.

British colonizers tried to suppress Irish culture, including dancing, as far back as the 17th-century Penal Laws. Over many years, Ward told students, dancing—aided by itinerant “dance masters” surreptitiously teaching traditional steps—resisted cultural extermination. 

The Irish “even used to have someone stand on the roof of a house, just so they can tap or stomp their feet to alert the people downstairs for dancing that the redcoats are approaching,” she said. “They started attaching coins to the heels and soles of their shoes to make more noise.…They were even using the rhythm of the redcoats marching down the streets to dance to. 

“Irish dance was more than just dance. It was a preservation of a culture. It was a preservation of people.”

In the 1990s, generations after Irish independence, Riverdance emerged as an expression of that culture—but commodified and “shaped for an international audience,” said Ward, who screened for the class a performance on a massive Dublin stage. In stark contrast to traditional dances, the video featured orchestral music, a cumulus backdrop, and—along with many dancers in the traditional, arms-hugging-sides tap dancing—Riverdance co-creator Michael Flatley, leaping around stage, the folds of his snowy pirate shirt billowing like an eagle’s wings. 

Students caught the difference between traditional and new moves. “Michael’s not restricted at the torso,” said one, adding that his roaming across the stage was almost “territorial.”

Arsheya Jaishiva (CDS’28) says she enrolled in the class after its surface contradiction piqued her interest: “When we think about dance, the last thing we think about is political resistance.” But the course’s historical study has given her new perspectives on topics like anti-Nazi resistance in World War II. “We know about that, but we never studied the dance aspect of it and how it could be such powerful resistance,” she says. “Professor Ward is such an amazing teacher because she has so much experience in this, and we’re able to connect our own cultures to it as well.” 

For Jaishiva, that has meant writing about street theater in India as an advocacy tool for women in the 21st century. “I didn’t know that those dances were used for any sort of political resistance, let alone for women’s rights.…There’s costumes, dance, a lot of facial expressions.”

Dancing may not have toppled tyrants. But the fact that governments have sought to suppress indigenous dance over the centuries, Jaishiva notes, demonstrates how subversive they consider it. “It’s allowed [women activists in India] to build a community within each other and also to advocate for their rights.” 

Nia Negron (ENG’28) went to the first class of the semester, uncertain about whether she’d stick with it. As a dancing fan, she knew little about folk dance, but she found Ward’s survey of different nations’ traditions intriguing. “With each one, we learn a little bit about the history of the culture and why their folk dance looks the way it does,” Negron says. For class essays, “We were encouraged to look at folk dance relating to our own ethnicities and cultures, so I feel like I have learned a lot more and connected more with my Hungarian heritage, which I am truly grateful for.”

Teaching the class taps the personal for Ward: her Lebanese family and her master’s degree thesis in comparative literature at Lebanese American University, which compared Irish and Lebanese art under oppression. 

Dance in both countries—“which historically are not connected in any way, shape or form,” she tells BU Today—share certain motifs: “They do similar dance formations. Their steps are also similar. There is heavy footwork in their dances.” Beyond Ireland and Lebanon, the course includes other nations of the Levant. Traditionally, Ward says, the way that the dabke was performed signified the land type the dancer lived on. People from flat valley areas danced softly and “swayed slightly. However, if they came from the mountains, they would go down and up, kind of mimicking the terrain.”

Other class case studies range from New Zealand, where the indigenous Maori haka has been used by protesters in solidarity with such causes as Black Lives Matter, to Africa and China. 

Ward’s doctorate is in English composition and applied linguistics, but even those studies are relevant to dance, she says, since applied linguists study the effect of language on politics and culture. “I look at the impact that language has on everything around us, how it shapes the way we think.” 

The class teaches two key takeaways. First, says Ward, “the importance of art and music and creating a community. Yes, science is very important. STEM is very important. But let’s not kill the humanities.”

Second, she hopes students come to appreciate their own culture and those of others, especially in our age of angry politics. “We’re so used to hating each other.…I think there’s nothing that brings people together better than art and dance and music. This is what binds us. Nothing else does. Politics separate us, languages separate us, but music is a universal language. Dance is a universal language.”