What a weekend. I've stayed up later than I have all decade, I've had more hours of sustained dance bliss than I have in ages, and I'm feeling more and more that this Irish set dance style is seeping deeper into the skin and the heart (certainly into the soles of my feet.) All this is from 3 days of set dancing at Tralee.

Here's the primer for those who haven't a clue. Irish set dance looks vaguely like our square dance, but you move your feet in rhythm with the music. You dance to reels, jigs, hornpipes and polkas. A single set dance has 3 to 6 figures, each figure has it's own particular music. The first figure may be a reel, the next a jig, and so on.

What I see in this are all the antecedants of the contemporary square and contra dance figures that are so familiar to me. There's Grand Chain, Square Set, Right and Left Through, even Gypsy Meltdown. This is where it all came from. The figures are familiar. What I had to learn was to keep my footwork in time with the music and with my partner.

The lesson from Bridie notwithstanding, I did fine at the dance weekend. A basic left-right-left-pause got me through most of it. These dances are not called, so when they say, "The next dance is the Cashel Set," everyone knows what to do. I just made sure I had a partner who did.

Here was the peak moment. The hall is a grand ballroom, great wooden beams forming an apex 20 feet overhead to a skylight. A great black wrought iron three-tiered chandelier and four smaller chandeliers light the room. It's a grand springy wood dance floor. 200 people are dancing the Connemara Reel. The floor murmers with the battering of heels and toes. The floor speaks, it shouts, it rolls and sways in rhythm, Thump-pa-ta-pa-thump pa-THUMP-pa-THUMP-ta-pa-THUMP-THUMP. Quiet as the figure breaks into a swing, then forward and back, pa THUMP, pa-ta-pa-THUMP. I am near tears.

The Irish are easygoing about my mistakes. The English get miffed if I make a mistake and don't forgive me for the rest of the evening. The Americans want it precise and accurate, and aren't quiet about just how it should be done. The Irish complement me on my dancing skills. Mary Doorty, who I danced my first set in Kilfenora last April, sees me in the Cashel set. "You have a musical gift," she says. "You're a fine dancer, you are."

January 1999