An Interview
by
Annie from Dublin
You are also an acclaimed author on Irish Dance, with many articles and five books to your credit so far. Tell me about that facet of your life and how it began.
I suppose I drew on different aspects. Being trained as a scientist here I’ve been writing theses, supervising theses, writing papers for about forty years. But during the 1980’s I realized that I was now not only interviewing people, looking up books and everything I could get on dancing, and realizing there was such a lack of knowledge, of printed material on this - for forty or fifty years before that there hadn’t been a book or a thing produced on Irish Dancing at all.
The other thing I was becoming critically aware of was that our Irish Dancing teachers really knew nothing, literally nothing at all of the background of the art form that they were teaching. It’s extraordinary. In the last 48 hours I had a call from one of the really prominent figures in Irish Dancing, and this man was asking me did I know anything about this dance The High-Cauled Cap, what was the significance of it, where did it come from and so on? That is just an example of our teachers were teaching an art form that, first of all I don’t think they appreciated how wonderful, fantastic teachers that they themselves are, what wonderful choreographers they are, if anything they knock themselves because they didn’t really appreciate themselves.
It’s taken these shows to make them appreciate themselves. Also, the other aspect is that they really never read or learnt anything very much at all about the background. I mean, why do you wear a Tara brooch on your costume? What is the piece down the back, the shawl, where did it come from? What’s the set dances? What’s the significance of the names of any of them? How old are these dances?
We were very much dug into competition, what we asked ourselves was ‘who won the championship last Sunday?’ ‘’Who is judging the one coming up next week?’ and ‘when is the closing date for the entries?' -- completely competition orientated.
By the way, dancing teachers in previous times judged their success by the champions they produced, and now that’s in the melting pot, they’re going through an extraordinary adjustment period. Nowadays, it’s not so much by the champions that you produce, or World champions, it’s ‘I have 16 dancers dancing in the shows!’
Interesting, but many of them found that quite a difficult adjustment. The shows were depleting them and I’m sort of saying ‘well, maybe you have to assess your merit, your worth in terms of how you’ve done training dancers for the shows.’ It’s a new aspect, and now I hear these phrases coming out in conversation ‘excuse me, I’ve got 5 dancers at the moment performing on Broadway, 5 of my pupils’ That has replaced somewhat the old criteria.
But they still didn’t know about the background of their dancing.
1987, I was going to an old Dance Master in Cork, Cormac O’Keefe. He was actually born in 1896 and I have a cassette recording of him, and the first thing he says on it is ‘John, I was born in 1896.’ And I feel happy whenever I hear that tape, that I had the foresight to record that man and his memories. He can remember going to his first dancing lesson in 1902, 100 years ago.
And I’ve given copies of that tape to his great Granddaughter who is dancing in England at the moment. But he was really getting quite old in his late 80’s and I used to always say to him ‘some day I’m going to write all of this down, Mr. O’Keefe’ and his last thing that he ever said to me in the hospital before he died was,‘Your book, you’re writing the last chapter now. You must write it so that others will know.’ That’s the last thing he said to me and I said ‘That’s my cue!’ I thanked him and I walked out, I knew I would never see him again. I didn’t want to go back, that was my cue.
So I wrote up my first book, and when you look at it you could cringe. It was so amateurish. It wasn’t a printed process, and it was a kind of photocopied thing. But it was like everything you do in life you look back at it 20 years later and say ‘oh my God!’ did we actually do that?
But I have my M.Sc theses up there, and when I was typing that about 1960 we typed them where we had to bang out on a typewriter, with 4 carbon pages behind it. If we wanted to get 4 copies of a graph, we couldn’t photocopy it. We didn’t even have a photocopier, so you must always look at something in the context.
It was very interesting the way my 1987 book was received by teachers, saying ‘what’s this about? And what’s it got to do with? Is this an invented thing?’ Because there wasn’t a competition or a feis coming up they weren’t sure at all about it. It didn’t fit into the pigeonhole. And then the other aspect was I remember very good friends of mine from Scotland coming up to me, giving out hell to me because I had nothing about the history of Irish Dancing in Scotland.
So it took a bit of time for people to read it and then some people looked and said ‘oh, that's very interesting’, you know. And believe you me I didn’t have a clue about publishing or printing. It was printed by a man down in Middletown in Cork here, and he asking me how many copies did I want - I ‘m sort of saying ‘I don’t know, would we do 200’ and he persuaded me that 200 was ridiculous, and yet when he told me the price of thousand copies I said ‘oh my God!’ you know ‘wait a while, I’m not made of money!’
But I’ve learned a lot over a period of time. So that was the first one in 1987, and then second one followed in 1990. They contained a lot of what I would call biographical sections, which, a lot of this been taken over by such things as Irish Dancing Magazine, coming out in England on a monthly basis, and they are more taking over doing biographical interviews with people, so my style of book gradually changed as well.
I look back and I cringe as I say when I see that I didn’t even try to edit the writing, the phraseology, the punctuation - everything is absolutely appalling! Sometimes I feel so bad about that, and the only way I get over it is to say ‘John, there was nobody else doing it, you did it and it’s there. Somebody else can edit it, punctuate it and do all of that, but the data is there,' and I suppose in one way part of the charm is the crudeness of it.
One friend of mine jokes with me and says, ‘If I read about Alice Whittey any more, she’s in every page in the book! Did you ever think of editing and putting a chapter on Alice Whittey?'. And I laughed because she was right, there was no editing, I took a whole load of the pieces. But I’ve learned, and my recent books were then - the North American book was brought out as an attempt to stimulate the people in North America and sort of say ‘this is the bird’s eye view of Irish Dancing in North America, but there’s a huge amount needed on North America.
And I did not try to cover North America in that book as one can appreciate, but if you could stimulate people to take on their own geographical areas.
The whole history of Irish Dancing is now a field, a topic, and in many ways I hope posterity might look back on me as a pioneer, one of the pioneers in that field, and it will be a big field in times to come. Still, we don’t have enough local pictures in different areas to make a global picture, and you cannot make a broad, general global statement unless you’ve got the local pictures to build up, and sort of say ‘I can’t tell you that because O’Sullivan, we’ll say, up there in Donegal, she did a thesis and she didn’t find any such thing.’
Will the MA thesis become the basis of a sixth book?
Very definitely. I brought out the book on the history of Ceili dancing that was brought out precisely because 1898 was the first Ceili event ever held in London, and I felt there was little or nothing done to commemorate that. So in that book, I brought that one out, I think it was a year later, 1999. By the time I got it printed and all that, because I thought we should have something to commemorate that fantastic event. And that was the London Irish that did that, you know. They collected all those dances. They ran the first Ceili event and everything, not the Irish in Ireland but the Irish community in London, the Gaelic League again.
We've the Dancing Commission - and I wear two caps because I am Vice Chairman of that Commission, totally loyal to it and will always be, but at the same time I can stand back and see the shortcomings of that body, and so that’s good and bad, because now they’re inclined to sit back and say ‘ah yes, John, but you’re taking care of that. You’ll look after that for us’, you know what I mean. They can get away with it. They can excuse themselves not doing that because ‘you’re doing it for us’.
The Dancing Commission produces 30 dances in our Ceili dance book, but in doing so we set those in stone and we’ve more or less said ‘that’s all there is to our heritage’. What I was very definitely trying to bring out in that book is there is a huge heritage, Irish figure dances, out there, that nobody recorded, and nobody collected. We didn’t have the Ciaràn MacMathumna going round the country collecting Irish Dancing, and the blame goes back to such bodies as the Irish Folklore Commission and the Gaelic League. They sent people out to record the literature, and to record the language, and to record the folklore to a large extent - and the music of course; well the music would lend itself to radio broadcasting and there was a commercial aspect that justified that, but the dancing hasn’t been collected by anybody, and there’s a whole heritage out there.
Nobody sent anybody out to collect the dance. And every year you get further away from it, you know, so I suppose the cry in that book was in many ways ‘please, can people realize there’s an awful lot more to it than we do in competition at the moment. In a simplified manner, we dance one four-hand reel. A dancing teacher only knows one four-hand reel.
All over the world we can go and we can tell you exactly how it must be done, not a second out, not a hand out, not this, not a toe wrong, but, in my book I’ve listed maybe about 20 or 30 different four-hand reels, all totally different, from different regions and different parts of Ireland, and just as authentic and lost to oblivion, and that’s sad.
My future plans are, when I brought that one out on the Ceili dancing I hadn’t completed everything I had on the Ceili dancing. Every Ceili dance, I want to document where it came from, also those ones that I have records of and descriptions of that have not been published anywhere, I want those to go down, so I intend to bring out a second part of that Ceili dance book. The reason I didn’t put them in the first book was that that book had to be brought out really to commemorate the first Ceili, I was under pressure - like the Millennium, you had to do it now or never!
So my next plan is to bring a second part to that Ceili dance book, and then I hope I’ll get all that off my chest. However, now other things have intervened and I have realized that like it or lump it I’m caught up in this web which I never intended to get into in the first place. That was like the first book that I did with the horrible big green cover, A4 size, was out of print. Then you find that people are reading a book belonging to you and they get very aggravated when they find ‘oh the first book, oh no, that was all sold out, that’s out of print, gone years ago, you can’t get that any more.’ They want the full set. So that ties up with I met this man Mick O’Connor in the Remedial Clinic Dublin, and he works in the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, (CRC), and usually now inside the cover of my recent books you can read about that clinic. It’s for totally disabled people. And he is very much into the history of the Uilleann Pipes; he does more or less for the pipes what I’m doing for the dancing, but he had experience of publishing because the CRC do printing and publishing.
We met at one stage and he nicely pointed out to me that my big green book, while it was very fascinating, pioneering work for its time, the format left a lot to be desired, and he said ‘we could do a lot for this, and we could help you out with that, and why don’t you give me a call about it’. So I did and he had wonderful ideas, because he was very much into the history of the music and not too far divorced, he knows a bit about the old dancers. So we were talking the same language and he had the expertise in the publishing business. So for the costume book I got on tow with him, and meanwhile, with visiting the CRC I saw these people and all I could say was ‘there but for the grace of God go you or I’ and I can rarely visit that clinic without getting a lump in my throat when I see them, and when the little children come in ... and here I am enjoying years of the fruits of Irish Dancing, God gave me a wonderful, healthy life in so many ways.
My book production now, I’ve set up my own little financial fund, I’m becoming a little bit more organized, but I’m not a businessman, I do the thing out of the love, the love of the dancing is the first thing, but anybody who buys books from me, every check that I get goes into a little account that I keep now and I have enough money built up in that to keep the CRC going in publishing the books, and that gives work to them and the money that’s left over will eventually go over to them. But now, keeping six books balanced is not easy. I now realize that my second book was running out and sometimes somebody orders a book and you go and you say ‘I thought I had 20 or 30 copies of that, I must have more somewhere else, good Lord I haven’t, panic stations, I’m going to have to get that redone.’
And now, the other day, I realized the one on North America, with Michael Flatley, is running low. But the great thing now is that the CRC has them all on disc, and every photograph. They also came up with the idea to design the lovely covers for me. All those photographs are from my archive collection. They persuaded me, not that I needed much persuading, that the cover of a book means so much, and ... I mean this as a compliment to them, the [original] cover of my second book, that’s being redone now, in this format, and they would all have the spine, with the name down the side like that, in the series, and they take these photographs from my archive collection and they design these covers, and the covers in themselves I think are a beautiful work of art. That’s a tribute to the CRC.
And sometime you go up there when another book is completed and I sometimes tear my hair out and say ‘what in the name of God am I doing with this, getting involved with this and marketing these?’ because that wasn’t the angle I started off with, and every time I get under pressure I just stop and I think of the people in the CRC and say ‘John, God gave you half a brain, and a reasonably healthy body, use it and stop complaining,’ you know!
So my future is to bring out a second part of the Ceili Dance book, bring out the thesis on the History of Irish Dancing in Cork City as a book, and obviously that will take some work as well, because the way you write a thesis and the way you write a book are two totally different things.
And I pay tribute here in my own way to the head of the Folklore department here - Gearòid O’Chrudhlaoich his name is, he supervised my MA thesis, and it was sort of an unusual situation. Here we were, two friends, two people who knew each other, and here he was supervising in a topic in which obviously I knew far more than he did, or almost anybody else for that matter, and I got tremendous training from him, because he made me stop and analyze, a thesis is not just all biographical data, it’s an analysis of the process. You know, why did that man McCarthy, stop travelling around West Cork? Why did he settle in Cork City? Why? What was the social factor? What was the economic climate? Why? Was he the only one? Why was it that he stopped teaching?
So I learned to analyze the whole situation, I learned to ask myself questions - sometimes I didn’t know the answer and I might be driving the car along and suddenly - this man that I talked about earlier on, Cormac O’Keefe, that I listened to so often, I suppose he was the one, listening to him and talking to him, more than anybody else, gave me that love of the history, sometimes a phrase that he maybe used to me 20-odd years ago would suddenly come back into my mind, when I had to ask myself particularly about Cork, I would ask myself ‘why did that happen?’ I would often go back and either think of Cormac O’Keefe, or sometimes a phrase that he would use, that I hadn’t heard for 20 years, or sometimes I would go through his notes and his tape and the answer was there - not always highlighted in big letters, but it was there.
So I learned from Gearòid the process of writing a thesis - mind you, as well, writing a thesis in an Arts topic is totally different from a science thesis! In a science thesis you have your objective, your literature, your materials, your experiments, the results of those experiments, the conclusion from the results of those experiments, there’s a set formula - and we don’t footnote things. Your have a literature of references and the whole style is different. In many ways it was a help to have a thesis in science but in other ways it was a total hindrance! It’s a different style of writing.
The past six or seven years have seen such a worldwide explosion in the expansion of Irish Dance. Can you be tempted to have plans to write a further work, on the State of the Art in the year 2000?
I’m not too sure about that, and I’ll tell you why. The role that I see for myself goes more like this; I’ve got a lot of data in my archive and in my head, and I hope this doesn’t sound pompous or egotistical, but my objective before I die would be to get as much of the knowledge that I have collected in my head and in my notes, to get that down, and if that helps other people to write theses in the future.
Like I now help 40, 50 people doing theses and projects on dancing. Then I think I will have served a better purpose. Very often I go to old people and the first thing they say is ‘I don’t know what I have to talk to you about. There’s nothing I can tell you’ and you talk to them and when you stop them they say ‘good Lord, I never knew...’ they don’t realize the importance of what they do know.
So I have loads of figure dances that I’ve collected that were never published, loads of other information going back, reaching back, and I think that’s more important to put that down. The other way I feel about it is that because of the explosion of the shows you’ve also had an explosion of writers coming on the scene, crawling out of the woodwork if I do say, jumping on the bandwagon. That’s fine, so what’s happening at the moment is being very well catered for, it certainly is not being neglected.
But I would challenge the worth of the vast majority of the writers commentating on the modern state of the art, that surely it’s not coming from people with your experience and your knowledge?
That is very true, and that is one of the great shortcomings. I see articles there by people and I immediately say ‘it’s easy to know you were never an Irish Dancer’. They’re modern writers who analyze a show and you see their analysis and say ‘good God, give me a break!’
But for me to cater for that end would be just one more person on that bandwagon, whereas what I do really feel my role would be more important to get down on paper - and I see people like say, Frank Hall, he did a thesis in Anthropology in America, and I read his thesis and I find he says ‘according to Cullinane’s theory, or Cullinane’s hypothesis’ and I say ‘ I didn’t know I had one!’ And I see where he’s coming from; he’s taken data that I’ve put down, from my book or somewhere, that I’ve recorded, and he’s analyzed it and he’s able to postulate something out of it, and if people, other people can do that, great, then what I’ve put down, even in that 1987 book, no matter how badly written or expressed, the data is there, and other people can use that data.
Another facet of my life is, you know, I got a First Honors M.Sc, and being honest with you I was very pleased with that - in science you only get your M.Sc or your Ph.D., or you don’t. You pass or you fail. We don’t have any Honors or categories at all, so I was surprised even at this MA, you know they were talking about ‘oh, definitely you’ll get an Honors.’ I said ‘I only want an MA, I don’t care whether it’s pass or honors, I wasn’t interested in that at all, you know. I was more interested, proud, for Irish Dancing. I wanted to get this to say that Irish Dancing was recognized, but I did get a First Honors, and then the question was posed, ‘Well, if you get a First Honors, you’ve got so much else, because the one thing was my thesis was curtailed and curtailed and cut back and cut back, so they were saying ‘John, you’ve ten other chapters but you can’t afford to go into them', you know.
So, they’re saying ‘you can do this later on, see how you do’. So the question is ‘Are you going to go ahead and do a Ph.D. on this?’ and that’s a question I’ve got to kind of analyze myself. I’ve thought about it, and again, to add continuously to this, it’ll be my second Ph.D. - which would be lovely, to have a Ph.D. in Science and a Ph.D. in Art, great glorification, another nice day of conferring ... but who’s that going to benefit? It's going to benefit John Cullinane, going up there to get another Ph.D. - I’m not sure it’s going to benefit Irish Dancing History, so I think what I should do is clear the decks a bit more of as much as I can of what’s in my head, and I don’t want to go to the grave with one scrap of information in my head that isn’t recorded. And so I think that as long as I can I should keep producing books and get the data down there in a form that can be used by other people.
So my priority would be the continuation of the Ceili book, and then the Cork dancing one based on my thesis, and then perhaps a final book which might be a miscellaneous conglomeration. But I think it would be better to get that down rather than go off and do a Ph.D., and then I think posterity might look a bit kinder on me, to see looking back ‘God, he produced 8 books’ and you know, every bit of scrap that you could look for, or as near as possible, would be there. I think that would be a greater service than going off and doing a Ph.D. thesis.
Mind you, I’m retiring from lecturing here next October after 40 years and that will give me just a bit more free time. Don't tell anybody how little I have been doing! I must say I have scaled down my sciences enormously because of the whole dancing interest. But it is a very pleasant stage to be at, I was 60 last October, I had a grand big birthday party in the Imperial Hotel in Cork, invited all my friends, 70 or 80 of them there, and the one condition was I did not accept a birthday present from anybody, that’s taboo. If you wanted you could buy a book or you could make a donation to the CRC, that was it. It was my celebration to say ‘thank you, God, for giving me my health and strength at 60.
So for the rest of my life I have the time and resources to go ahead and do this research work that I love, and my archive collection - by the way, a little aside, the archive collection, I’m now at the stage where people realize the value of it and donate material to me, whereas before I was going round begging, or, I saw you with a letter there and I’d almost wait to pinch it from you or get a copy of it, and now people come to me and say ‘I have this, I know I’m never going to do anything with it, you’re the one ..’ and that’s wonderful, that’s a feeling of recognition and acceptance that has come.
So I have my time now that I can afford to devote all my time now to doing research work, and the books are self-financing now. I’m not in it to make money, so long as I can get enough to keep me going and keep the CRC happy then, that’s great. It's doing a great job for them as well. I can go up to them next week and say ‘this one is being redone, and there’s the check for it out of my book fund, you know, so I’m no longer taking money out of my personal pocket, which I did originally, so it’s nice, it’s great when you get to your sixties, to be so active, mentally so active.
You know, my colleagues here, they play golf and say ‘ when I retire I’m going to be bored stiff. What can I do? I can’t play golf 7 days a week.’ And I say, when I retire I’m not retiring, I’m just changing the emphasis, changing the jobs, and that I think is a very, very happy position. Now I get emails and faxes from all over the world and this morning alone I had inquiries from a person in Melbourne about examinations, and inquiries from another person about dancing on the curriculum in Australia - one fax and one phone call from Australia. I get emails from all over the world about Irish Dancing, and I love it, it’s great. I enjoy it all, and the fact that I’ve got it to keep me occupied in my so-called years of retirement - I think I’ll be more busy than anything!
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Cover Image Title and Description Irish Dancing Costumes, Their Origins and Evolution
Fascinating study of the evolution of costume in Irish Dancing, including unique period photographic record from as early as 1892.
123 pages. softcover. b/w photographs. First published 1996.
Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing in North America
Study og the history of Irish Dancing in Norht America from research begun when Dr. Cullinane was first invited to give workshops in San Francisco in 1972. Includes photographs and sections on different regions of North America, also details of costume evolution and feiseanna in North America.
99 pages. softcover. b/w phtographs. First published 1997.
Aspects of the History of Ceili Dancing 1897-1997
Produced to celebrate the centenary of the foundation of Ceili Dancing, includes valuable photographic records plus sections on the origins, the contribution of the Gaelic League, classification of Ceili Dances and an account of the First Ceili in London, 1897.
80 pages. softcover. b/w phtographs. First published 1998.
Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing in Ireland, England, New Zealand, North America and Australia
First look at world history of Irish Dancing. Includes excellent gallery of photographs, plus sections on the history of the Ceili dancing, the dancing masters, costumes, the Cork contribution, feiseanna, competition, dancing around the world.
185 pages. softcover. b/w photographs. First published 1987.
Further Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing (Ireland, Scotland, Canada, America, N. Zealand and Australia)
This is a real reference book, listing accounts of feseanna and competitions of various years in the different places, and is clearly meant to be read in conjunction with the first book of the title.
150 pages. softcover. b/w photographs. First published 1990.
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