Dancers step to next level

On most Wednesday nights, you’ll find the Academy of Fine Arts alive with the sounds of bagpipes, fiddles, flutes and drums.

Hidden away in a downstairs dance studio one March evening, Lori Madden instructs a group of Irish stepdancing students in a warm-up exercise, as the lively Irish tunes play on a nearby boom box.

Lined up in front of the studio’s mirror, the students alternate between tapping their toes and heels on the hardwood floor, picking up speed as they go. Their feet are outfitted in pairs of black, laced-up slippers that make a swooshing sound on the floor.

“I can hear your feet,” Madden says during a pause in the music. “Swish, swish, swish.”

The exercises are to prepare them for the extensive footwork they’ll soon be engaging in.

Stepdancing is a form of Irish dancing characterized by a still, but not rigid, upper body and quick, precise movement of the feet.

“It’s such a beautiful combination of strength and grace. It’s control and abandon,” says Madden, executive director and dance coordinator of the Blue Ridge Irish Music School in Charlottesville. “It’s the dichotomy of a poised upper half and, from the waist down, going wild.”

The actual footwork is a set of basic movements that correspond to different Irish tunes.

“You put them together and arrange them in different ways,” Madden says. “As time goes on, there are more moves that enter the repertoire.”

Dancers start out using the ballet-like slippers, called soft shoes, before graduating to leather shoes, or hard shoes, that have slight heels and fiberglass toes for tapping and making noise.

“The dance (technique) is strict, but the class isn’t strict,” says Hope Wright, a 14-year-old Dunbar Middle School student.

The girls in Madden’s Academy class range in age from 10 to 15, yet most are dance veterans who started years ago. Wright, for instance, began studying with Madden six years ago.

Madden will teach girls as young as 7 years old in her classes.

“It’s a pretty rigorous dance form,” she says. “There’s nothing free form about it, so it can be really frustrating if you’re not ready for it developmentally.”

But it’s not uncommon for children in Ireland to start learning it during their toddler years.

“It’s just because of the amount of training involved, but part of it is the cultural phenomenon,” says Madden, who began teaching stepdancing in Charlottesville 10 years ago and at the Academy seven years ago.

In Ireland, the dancing is steeped in cultural tradition.

“It was very organic and part of the life of the people,” she says. “You just grew up knowing the dances. It was all passed on from person to person.”

It had a revival of sorts in Ireland during the late 1800s and early 1900s, Madden says, as a way for the Irish people to reclaim part of their culture.

“Ireland is a country that has a history of occupation,” she says, adding that the citizens were looking for ways to “separate themselves from their oppressors.

“They wanted it to be really high art, as opposed to just folk dancing. They were trying to elevate it somewhat … by including elements of a really still upper body and really controlled and balletic movement (in the feet).”

The genre exploded in the United States in the mid-1990s when Michael Flatley and Riverdance hit the scene.

“What Michael Flatley and Riverdance did was two-fold,” Madden says. “They made it hugely popular around the world. But, also, they did a lot to change the form in a lot of ways.”

Several of the girls in Madden’s Academy class say Riverdance was what that inspired them to enroll.

“I used to copy what they did,” says 10-year-old Emily Foster, who started three years ago. “I wanted to do it too.”