Caroline O'Donoghue: 'I still watch Riverdance’s interval act performance from 1994 about, oooh, ten times a year'
It was the Eurovision last weekend. I didn’t watch it this year. My relationship with the Eurovision is a forever fluctuating thing. I’m either in the mood or I’m not. Like water parks or meeting your friend’s new baby, you can feel positively about something and still have to psych yourself up for how full-on it’s going to be. There have been years where I have screamed for the victory of a country I have never heard of, but there have also been years where I have been completely unaware of the Eurovision even happening.
I do have a feeling about the Eurovision, however, that never changes. I still watch Riverdance’s interval act performance from 1994 about, oooh, ten times a year. I have made my English friends watch it countless times, roundly baffling them each time. “Where are they all coming from?” they ask, as yet more dancers appear as if from nowhere. “What is with his shirt?” they bleat. And: “Can all Irish people just do this?” I like showing it to people, but most of all, I like to sit alone in my house and watch it to make myself cry. Then I text my sister, who will then watch it again, and cry, again.
If you love a good crying jag, as my sister and I do, there’s really nothing better than Riverdance. It’s the Veuve Clicquot of crying. For me, there are several emotional quadrants that need to be hit in order for a cry to be the really good, cleansing sauna of the soul. Riverdance hits them all.
when someone or something is so good that you struggle to believe that a human, a person who is flawed like you are flawed, can pull off such an accomplishment. This is how I feel when I look at the dancers.
This is a big one. This quadrant of the Cry Pie comes from me knowing something that the people in the video don’t yet know, because they are fannying about in the past, while I have cleverly chosen to be in the present. In the case of Riverdance, what I know is that the world is about to go absolutely gaga for this weird style of folk dancing, that every little girl in Ireland will dream of being Jean Butler, and that Michael Flatley will eventually live in a mad castle in Fermoy. That the country is about to have one of the most economically fecund decades of its entire existence. I know this! But they don’t! And this is overwhelming.
patriotism. Being patriotic is very hard because it is often embarrassing, and it is often racist. I think people who lose touch with the art and culture of their country are more likely to become racists, because they are more fixated on what their country is not, rather than what it is. They start saying things like: ‘we are a white country’ or ‘we are a Catholic country’. They think about immigrant cultures as threats to something fragile, rather than additions to something robust.
That is why it feels good to be patriotic about Riverdance. Because it is us. It is us showing a version of our culture, on a stage that is ours. We choreographed it; we filmed it; we scored it; we cast it with Irish people and with the children of the Irish diaspora.
We are a nation that is represented so often, and yet so seldomly on a world stage, and by ourselves. But I like folksiness, and sincerity, and my fallen arches kept me out of dance lessons, so I don’t mind. The shirt does suck, though.
My sister and I are constantly texting each other about Riverdance, and in particular our pet obsession, which is that we want to write a film about Riverdance. In my head, this plays like a kind of Behind the Candelabra fake-documentary about Jean and Michael being, firstly, the Yanks who are considered blow-ins by the Irish; then, it’s about Michael being an egomaniac. (This is all on the record by the way: Jean often says tasteful yet mysterious things like ‘Michael thinks in the first person’. Which – meow) Saoirse Ronan would, obviously, play Jean.
You can imagine our disgust when we found out the other day that there’s going to be a kids' movie about Riverdance, all CGI animation, about stags (or elks?? We can’t figure it out. Watch the trailer and get back to me) who dance. Sorry, but: what???? Surely the point of Riverdance is that people are doing it? Real people? I love an animated movie as much as the next person, but I am far less impressed by an animator’s ability to render tap dancing than I am by dozens of real human beings doing it in perfect unison. It’s baffling to me.
The upside of all this, of course, is that there’s still scope for me to write the Riverdance movie, and still time for Saoirse Ronan to clear her shooting schedule. Mr Whelan, baby, call me.
