Putting his best foot forward

Nic Gareiss will dance in a house in Cork at a Quarter Block Party event to mark the infamous Dance Halls Act, which brought state interference into people’s leisure pursuits, writes Marjorie Brennan

THE 1930s were a heady time in Ireland politically and culturally, with the nascent Free State struggling to assert itself. It was also a time when morality was strictly policed and monitored by both Church and State.

One of the instruments of this control was the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, which regulated dances in Ireland by introducing a licensing system and a tax on admission. The legislation was, in effect, a ban on groups of people gathering to dance in domestic and non-regulated spaces, and remains on our statute books.

Solo Square Dance is a one-person percussive dance piece conceived and by dancer Nic Gareiss in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the act in 2015, and it will be performed for the first time in Ireland at the Quarter Block Party festival in Cork this weekend.

Gareiss, who was born in Michigan, has a background in ethnichoreology, which he describes as akin to dance anthropology, and first became aware of the existence of the act while a student at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick.

“At the time I was struck by the idea that a government would place so much power on dance as to prohibit it and I was interested in examining the historical circumstances.

“It also made me excited as a dancer, because I didn’t ever think about the civic and political ways that my body can move. I discovered this kind of dance ban didn’t just happen in Ireland. There have been dance bans throughout the world. My research area is the North Atlantic area in the United States, Appalachia and maritime Canada. Because I practise dance forms from all those areas, I was really interested in the subversive power of dance in those environments.”

The Dance Halls Act was based on the findings of the Carrigan Commission, which had been set up to look at what was perceived as the declining moral condition of the nation.

“The commission was about immorality across the board,” says UCC historian Donal Ó Drisceoil. “There was the whole question of prostitution, child sex abuse, all of that came into it, but basically it was a kind of concern with the moral fibre of the new State. The report was finished in 1931 but it wasn’t published. It was kept under wraps until recent decades. It was censored essentially because of what it revealed about what was going on in the country. Arising out of it, they passed a couple of laws — the ban on contraceptives in 1935 and the dance halls act, aimed at curbing unsupervised unlicensed dances in houses. It was basically about supervising women and not allowing unfettered immorality to prevail. ”

According to Ó Drisceoil, dancing at that time often occurred spontaneously — people did literally ‘dance at the crossroads’, but such gatherings were frowned upon because Irish dancing was also seen a threat.

“Set dances and so on were also seen as a bit dubious; they were seen as racy because there was a bit too much physical contact. The dance halls act introduced this licensing and basically gave the police, the courts, the clergy a huge amount of control. It was very difficult to get a licence unless they gave you the nod. We have evidence of people in rural areas basically saying it put an end to the spontaneous Irish traditional gathering, with dances, music and scoraíochtaí.”

The influence of the Catholic church was clearly felt in the State’s regulation of people’s leisure time, according to Ó Drisceoil.

“From the foundation of the State onwards, the Bishops, in their annual Lenten pastorals, were obsessed with dances, alcohol, ‘evil’ literature, immodest female fashions, all of these things were seen as a moral threat. Motor cars were also seen as potential locations of immorality. It was a constant pressure and eventually the dance hall act was introduced. There was also the anti-jazz campaign which took off in 1934,” he says.

This was when Fr Peter Conifrey led a march through Mohill, Co Leitrim, in which demonstrators called on the Government to ban jazz music and all foreign dances in Ireland. Jazz, the campaign argued, was an “engine of hell” deployed to do the devil’s work.

“It is hard for us to imagine now the almost Talibanesque power and control the clergy had. They literally did turn up at dances, stand at doors, knock at doors, chase people down, name people from the pulpit, and put pressure on parents. It was all very tangible and they traded on that fear,” says Ó Drisceoil.

This view of dance as transgressive and a threat to morality is something that Gareiss was keen to capture in Solo Square Dance.

“Throughout history we have been discouraged from engaging in and experiencing pleasure. People who engage in music and dance feel powerful and liberated. Dance also helps us move out of ourselves and feel connected to a community. When we feel that kind of power, it can be very intimidating to an institution that wants to keep us in line and control us,” he says.

The act would also have been called into play in more recent times, particularly for the regulation of raves in the 1990s.

“Official raves like those in Sir Henry’s were obviously held under licence but the ones held in the countryside and in barns, a number of them would have been targeted under the dance halls act because they were held without a licence,” says Ó Drisceoil. “Even though it was a different moral atmosphere and a different cultural context, it was the same idea, that it was unsupervised, therefore it had to be stopped.”

In the case of raves, the moral panic concerned drugs, especially the use of ecstasy. “It was an exact echo of what was happening in the 1930s, but it was drink that was the evil then,” says Ó Drisceoil.

The performance by Gareiss for Quarter Block Party will take place in a house, reflecting how dance was banished from the domestic sphere due to the act.

This is going to be amaaaazzing. See Nic Gareiss perform his SOLO SQUARE DANCE, at a special location, this Friday (Details at https://t.co/yOx9vYgGLd) https://t.co/uF4IEH64d1

— Quarter presents (@QtrBlockParty) January 30, 2018

“Because of that, there have been some pretty significant changes to the way we view dance,” says

Gareiss. “It is often performed in a proscenium space, in a theatre or a big hall. Dancers, almost by magic, seem to appear and then disappear. We don’t see them warming up, we don’t see the physical labour that dancers engage with.

“I wanted to create a piece that laid that bare. I want people to feel they have been part of an event, almost as if they had gone to a country house party pre-1935 and experienced the magic of people sitting around

together, telling stories, sharing food and drink, playing music. The show very much tries to conjure that

feeling.”

Gareiss also hopes that those seeing the performance reevaluate movement in their own bodies as a way of potentially standing up to marginalising political forces.

“The simple fact of enjoying the physical pleasure of movement is a powerful thing. If we expand dance to include movement, marching and protesting, placing our corporeal selves in public spaces together to demonstrate our solidarity with each other or our public dissent of political tyranny, those are all things that can help us remember that dance is indeed a revolutionary act.”

Solo Square Dance by Nic Gareiss, 5.30pm this Saturday, meeting at Middle Parish Community Centre, Cork. Gareiss will also be performing as part of Slumber, a midnight show at Triskel Christchurch on Saturday. The Quarter Block Party festival runs from Friday to Sunday. quarterblockparty.com