As the interval ends, sumptuous music is heard, a nostalgic thread echoing the chorus from The Sleeping Tiger.
Show me where I belong, though I’m far away.
The beautiful Ireland of memory is to be left behind as the ocean is crossed: but not by ship, not this time – the show has leapt into the modern world.
Freedom
Instead, airplanes course across the screen as a female soloist in the uniform of an Aer Lingus hostess appears, performing what should be the truly impossible task of step-dancing in four-inch spike heels. Her dancing is restrained, almost awkward; the music of the jig lilts breathily and almost simpers on the edge of cliché, but not for long. Behind her, aircraft hangar doors roll open, the music makes a radical break to a modern rock beat, and the lords of the jungle prowl onto the stage: a troupe of pilots led by Michael, exquisite in a flawlessly tailored blue uniform and aviator shades.
The number is almost immediately handed off to the troupe again, the male dancers in airplane formation bearing the woman in flight across the ocean, flanked by soloists dancing in celebration of their own freedom; the big screen soars past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the group holding its complex formation without signs of effort. Once landed comes a moment of tension, as the uncertain new arrival is surrounded by seeming predators; but flames lick across the big screen and the music changes to bump-and-grind as the erstwhile air hostess turns on the heat. The men fall back from the blaze of energy and exit, and the constraints, restrictions and limitations of the old world are peeled off and cast aside without shame or apology.
Particularly for the American audiences, this has proved easily the most controversial number in the show – an interesting complaint to make for a work whose own creator described it as “controversial” even before the subject matter had been made public. This is a device Michael has worked with from the beginning: sexuality in dance, particularly strip dance, as a metaphor for personal freedom, even as the power of flight is one of the oldest and most universal symbols of freedom. Breakout is easily identifiable as a dance about power and empowerment: the unabashed bump-and-grind of Freedom makes it more difficult to recognise the same essential theme, despite the title of the piece. The message is not that sexuality is the only power that a woman has: in the unabashed energy of both male and female dancers can be seen the core vitality of the human spirit. The courage to leave a homeland, to cross a border and begin anew brings, in turn, an internal renewal.
In addition, the flow of the number through a sequence of musical and dance styles – from step-dance to rock to bump-and-grind – sets the tone for this “American” half of the show. The broadened horizons of the new world are explored through the medium of the dance.
A New World
The big screen parades through a montage of flag images from the different nations whose emigrés have found their way to the US, ending with the flag of Ireland. As the flags on the screen melt into one another, four dancers present huge banners on stage – not the flags of any nation, not even the US flag, but white banners, the blank page on which the future remains to be written.
The montage on the screen is followed by a more impressive one on the stage, spanning not only countries but continents, as South American salsa, classical ballet from Europe and flamenco from Spain take their turn with specifically American dance forms: the Astaire-Rogers amalgam of tap, swing and ballroom dance, and one of the most purely American dance forms of all, the explosive fusion of ethnic energy that resulted in hip-hop. Last of all, as with the flags, comes Irish dance, in which the entire company joins in a common celebration. The Irish in America did not remain isolated in ethnic conclaves, but entered the broader culture with such vigour as to continue to place their own imprint on it.
The number celebrates cultural and artistic diversity, but goes beyond a simple stir of the melting pot. As the sequence of different dance styles progresses, each maintains its own identity, and yet they lend support and encouragement to each other. The progression of Act II will continue to find enrichment in the interaction of different cultural and artistic traditions. This immigrant spirit is an essential part of the vital energy of America: the US may offer a broadened horizon of opportunity, but in so doing it reaps a priceless harvest of the spirit. The US would not exist and thrive without this immigrant energy.
Easy to overlook in this sequence is the stunning virtuosity of dancers, composer and choreographer: each of the dance styles is showcased with energy and expertise, but all the dancers then shift without apparent effort into the unique demands of Irish dance.
The Last Rose
Even as the new world is embraced, there is still a note of nostalgia. One of the most common themes in Irish folk lyric is loves separated – by class or circumstance, by misfortune or mischance, by time, by loss, by the ocean only one has crossed, with only memory to reunite them. Here Michael gives this classic theme the most classical dance treatment of all: a ballet pas de deux. (For this show, Michael has for the first time brought in an assistant choreographer with expertise outside of Irish dance, Molly Molloy.)
In a poignant casting choice, rather than playing the role of the lover himself, Michael stands to the side and watches as a younger couple, brought to life by the music of the flute, take their turn in the eternal pas de deux. He stands instead as a Faery piper whose music creates a magical world where the lovers of legend return to life, reunited in youthful passion and delight – but only as long as the music lasts.
Celtic Kittens
Nostalgia is left behind and the raw power of the fiddles is unleashed in the next number, as the spirit of the Celtic Tiger is reborn into a new era. The music follows the traditional structure of a reel, but the choreography owes nothing to tradition: the tiger’s red eyes blaze again from the big screen as dancers and musicians, men and women alike dressed in tiger-print outfits, prowl the stage in a wild explosion of exuberant energy.
As the title suggests, this is the new generation ready to explore a world of broadening promise: where earlier generations once needed to cross oceans to seek opportunity or to overcome obstacles and limitations, the new breed faces no such desperate choice. One of the hallmarks of Ireland’s economic renaissance was the reversal of the “brain drain” – for decades, even centuries, Ireland had sent its best and brightest overseas, exporting its future to the enrichment of other lands. Now the young, the strong, the talented remain and even return, and their children need not think of leaving.
Capone
With the sultry purr of the saxophone, the show returns to the US and to the past, to resume its exploration of dance and musical forms with a style born of another fusion of ethnic energy and American circumstance: jazz. And “style” is the key term. The number takes its visual style from the images of 1920’s Chicago: the piece could almost have been titled “Chicago”, as Michael the choreographer takes on Bob Fosse with his own take on the jazz scene.
Style is the key. The big screen blazes scarlet, and Michael’s silhouette appears, reminiscent of the looming shadow that presaged his initial entrance in Lord of the Dance. In one of the show’s signature images, the image on the screen begins to dance: the music yowls and the feet blur as he moves into the now-rare high kicks. It is a stunning use of the technology, and particularly apt – jazz was the first self-consciously “modern” music.
At the same time, individual virtuosity reigns supreme in spite of technological advances: the massive digital image gives way to Michael’s live solo on stage amongst jets of flame and exploding pyros, which still only provide a frame for a display of unaccompanied footwork of unprecedented complexity. Also prominent is an undercurrent of Michael’s characteristically impish humour, here expressed in a send-up of the bad-boy image that so often accompanies a star turn. The historical setting of the number, named after the era’s most immediately recognisable figure, provides a style and context for this image – the gangland world of Prohibition-era Chicago was predominantly Irish (an inglorious chapter in the Irish-American saga), a blue-collar, working man’s world under the veneer of high stakes and high living. Even Michael’s shoes – custom two-toned saddle Oxfords – evoke the self-conscious style and strut of the era.
The solo leads into a magnificent showcase for the female chorus, applying the sexy sassiness and kinetic power and precision of Irish women’s hard-shoe to the brazen energy of jazz music and dance. Behind them, the big screen blazes through a series of urban images of flashing lights and neon signs, a sharp contrast to the quiet rural green of the first act.
Forever Free
The last of the vocal numbers, “Forever Free”, returns to the theme of freedom on the most deeply personal level. Like the other vocal numbers, this is not a traditional folk song; composed by Ronan Hardiman with lyrics by Frank Musker, and performed by Úna Gibney (who also provided backup vocals for the album), it links personal liberty with individual love.
Gone is the time when I lived in the past; I can see my destiny at last –
Now, forever free,
I am strong and brave with the wings you gave me,
Now forever free,
With you by my side, I can say with pride, “I am free.”
On tour, another change in staging brought the big screen into play, with the piece now set against a backdrop of an infinite starscape. The image underscores another theme that runs through this second act: that the undaunted imagination – whether liberated by love, belief, or circumstance – can feel free to recognise no lesser horizon than the stars.
Cowboy Cheerleaders
Act II’s romp through the dance landscape of the US continues with a whirl through the heartland of Americana. This ceili-style number features costumes modeled after the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders’, and dance moves and figures recalling cheerleading squad acrobatics, with recognisable elements from America’s own folk dance styles: square dancing, contra dance and country-and-western line dancing. The choreography flows effortlessly between styles, always finding common points on which to shift and blend, as the number of dancers in the interlacing figures steadily increases, and the changing stage patterns kaleidoscope effortlessly into even more complexity.
The music finds common ground between Irish folk instrumental styles and American country-and-western music – an ancestry that hearkens back to the Irish emigration to Appalachia, and the subsequent influence of Irish folk music roots on the Nashville style. The Chieftains have dedicated more than one album to what they describe as the “bluegrass/green grass” connection, and this number finds the same cousinship in dance styles: an essential immigrant wellspring for the most quintessentially American traditions.
These Colours Don’t Run
For this interlude (the only number in the show not included on the DVD), the band launches into a driving rock number as the big screen makes its own pictorial journey from the struggles of the past to the accomplishments of the present. Beginning with blurred black-and-white photos of the Famine years, through a montage of literary, political, cultural and sporting figures, Irish and Irish-American, the sequence celebrates the US as a country that welcomed the Irish, giving them a fresh start and an open horizon for advancement (although the Irish in America were for decades subject to particularly ruthless white-on-white racism, Celtic Tiger does not include any direct reference to this). From Joyce and Yeats to Pierce Brosnan, Bono, and the Chieftains, from Éamon De Valera and Michael Collins to John F. Kennedy, the sequence, like all of Act II, can be viewed as simplistically pro-American; or it can be interpreted as bearing witness to how the Irish spirit, having moved beyond its own past, has encountered and enriched the cultures of the world in general and the US in particular.
The images, although covering a broad range, are carefully chosen: those from the US political arena sidestep partisanship (both Reagan and Clinton appear, and Kennedy is far more prominently featured than either). At the end of the sequence, as the final chords crash in triumph from guitar and bass, the screen shows the space shuttle leaving the earth and the astronauts on the moon, saluting the colours – but the flag is the Irish tricolour. This last image recalls the theme presented by the space-age imagery from Planet Ireland and even Daire Nolan’s To Dance on the Moon – that limits are where you believe them to be, and the entire universe is none too large a challenge for the unbounded human spirit. At the same time, the ending brings a sense of deliberate, tongue-in-cheek ambiguity to the montage. Which “colours”, after all, does the title refer to? The final image is of the Irish tricolour.
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Some of the most enthusiastically patriotic music ever written in the USA was composed by George M. Cohan, an Irish-American who wrote “The Yankee Doodle Boy” in 1904. The song riffed on the much older folk song “Yankee Doodle”, and was Cohan’s first great commercial success after years of struggle on the vaudeville circuit. In 1942, in the midst of the second World War, another Irish-American with a vaudeville background, James Cagney, played Cohan in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, a tribute both to Cohan and to that era of American musical theatre. Irish musical genius was a key thread in the rich tapestry of American vaudeville, and the percussive dance heritage of Irish performers laid much of the foundation for American tap dance. Cohan’s work bridges the gap between the vaudeville stage and the popular musical, and taps into the period in American theatre history when the musical and dance traditions of different immigrant cultures intersected and influenced each other, ultimately nurturing the development of American tap and jazz dance, and leading into the golden age of the Broadway musical.
Yankee Doodle Dandy also hearkens back, idealistically, to an era in which patriotism itself was a simpler and more innocent emotion, free of partisanship, topicality or ideological agenda. This was Cohan's lifelong trademark, now difficult to recapture. In a world where patriotism is wielded as a weapon, we have all but forgotten what a simple, joyful feeling love of country can be. It is the heart’s pure love for a nation: not its leaders or politicians, not its ideologues, nor their causes and machinations. This is the love that is felt in the very soul of a land.
It is a love understood by children and best expressed in the simple enthusiasm of a parade – which is how the number begins on stage: the bikini-clad stripper appears, an unlikely but sincere image of freedom, miming “Yankee Doodle” on a fife. She is followed first by the pilots and then by the troupe as a whole in Cohanesque outfits, as images of American icons and ticker-tape celebration appear on the big screen and the fife tune morphs into Cohan’s masterpiece. The number that follows is unadulterated celebration – of country, of community, of heritage and hope, of the dance that has come full circle, returning to the Irish roots of American tap, capped with Michael’s signature move: the rapid-fire cascade move down the line of dancers, here executed as a salute.
Of all the numbers in the show, this one conforms most closely to the structure and style of Michael’s earlier work, and is the only piece to feature a solo of the type that hallmarked Lord of the Dance. The number concludes with company bows, after which an attendee might assume that the show is over; and those who have never attended an Irish dance show often do make that assumption.
Still to come are the encores. This is a practice maintained by most of the Irish dance shows, borrowed from live concert performance: both folk music and rock groups follow this pattern, but no other genre does. (It should be noted that the performers who regularly do so include the Chieftains.) The Irish dance shows share another characteristic with this type of live musical performance: acceptance, even expectation and encouragement of a personally involved, responsive audience – active rather than passive observers.
Audience response, enthusiasm and participation are severely restricted if not actively discouraged in most forms of theatre; yet folk music and folk art are essentially communal activities. The encore tradition in live performance relies on and reinforces this close relationship between the performers and the audience; from this point onwards, the performance unfolds on a sense of community that crosses the line of the stage apron, a border that in other theatres remains unbreachable.
Celtic Fire II (St. Patrick’s Day)
In Celtic Tiger, the encore tradition returns to its own roots as the band comes downstage, tearing into an electric medley of traditional pieces. As with other band numbers, the lead is shared and traded off amongst the instruments, but with a key difference when the guitarist (John Colohan in the DVD, later replaced by Gavin Ralston for the North American tour) is given the stage to himself for a searing Jimi-Hendrix style solo. This solo – which was, unfortunately, truncated on the DVD – is one point of the show that deliberately varies according to performance and venue. For the US performances, the solo used “The Star-Spangled Banner”; in Canada, “O Canada”, played with equal verve, power and virtuosity.
Hendrix’ unique interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, originally performed on the final day of Woodstock in 1969, is regarded as one of the key moments in the scrappy history of rock music, and any performer who emulates that style taps into the deep implications of that musical statement. More than merely controversial, the interpretation was a shock to mainstream American sensibilities of the time: in that performance, patriotism was redefined as a personal choice rather than a social mandate, a private relationship between the human heart and the soul of a nation. In Celtic Tiger, the solo is one final electric assertion that personal pride in country is rooted in the heart, and like other loves, must be able to transcend the immediate moment and look to the future.
The guitar’s final triumphant shout leads the band back onto the stage in an even more energetic explosion, culminating in the traditional jig “Saint Patrick’s Day”. The tiger dancers return to the stage, followed by the rest of the company in their long line, multiplied by the big screen to infinity; as the traditional tune reaches its end, the great ruby-eyed tiger roars again on the big screen.
The Celtic Tiger
After a pause, the sound of the guitar returns – but no longer playing lead. Instead, emphatic distorted chords lay down a rhythm guitar line only: the finale has become a pure rock and roll number, and the lead is carried by the percussion. But the percussion is not provided by the drum set: it is in the sound of the dancers’ feet. The music of the band supports, emphasises, lends build and power – but it is the percussive dance, the sound of the taps, that plays the lead and carries the piece, providing theme and variation, complexity and colour. In this last number, the live sound of the dance has been integrated into the very structure of the music; rather than the dancers following the music, it is the music that accompanies the dance.
For this final number, the troupe is in formal wear, men and women alike in tuxedos; they are dressed indeed for the world stage, infused with a pride that has risen beyond nationalism, untrammeled by borders. Michael at their head in a full tailcoat recalls the image of a maestro, conducting the shifts and interplay of the sound. The piece develops the most complex contrapuntal patterns heard yet, culminating in a reprise of the deceleration effect first heard in the opening number, still in perfect unison. As the finale at last turns and accelerates again to its climax, the sound of the feet is a flawlessly unified roar of triumph.
With the rebirth of the Celtic spirit as a force to be reckoned with in the modern world, the show and the dance have come full circle: the richly complex syncopated rhythm patterns of the finale include some of the same sequences used in the opening number, transformed by the journey and infused with the electric energy and bright promise of the new era.
The show ends as it began, with the sound, the rhythm patterns of the feet striking the floor. We hear and see the spirit of the Celtic Tiger striding into the future, and every step is a dance step.
Author: Louise Owen
click on the links below to read more
Celtic Fire
The 1916 Rising
Freedom
Capone
George M. Cohan, composer of Yankee Doodle Dandy
Yankee Doodle Dandy
St. Patrick's Day
The Celtic Tiger himself
