an investment in yourself — McTeggart Irish Dancers

by Nathan Bentley

As someone with no dance background (I tell beginners the closest I came to dance growing up was defensive drills in basketball) who took up Irish dance at the ripe old age of 35, allow me to recommend trying the thing you think is interesting or looks fun or whatever…because you never know. You might surprise yourself.

Maybe you really dig traditional Irish music. Or you saw one of the growing number of Irish dance stage shows and that style spoke to you. Or you just want to take a more active step in learning about the culture surrounding the art. You’ll soon find that the music and the steps play into each other to the point where, in some cases, it’s almost a ‘chicken or the egg’ arrangement. And that they tie into, and are informed by, nearly any other aspect of Irish arts one can think of.

Maybe you want to trick yourself into exercising without having to slog your way to the gym. Irish dancing will do it for you, and I promise that no matter what exercises or activities you’re pursuing now, you will discover you don’t use as many muscles as you think you do. All the while you’ll manage to work on your balance, learn about mobility and different types of strength, and counteract all the sitting (and staring at screens, etc., etc.) that I dare say most of us do all day. If nothing else, consider it an investment in yourself.

*Our first adult ceili team practicing in 2013*

Maybe you like the idea of joining a competitive team once the days of doing such a thing are assumed to be long passed. You can work with other like-minded folks in the quest to become a sharp, well-oiled, meticulous ceili team. Once you manage that, you’ll get the added benefit of gaining new perspectives on patience, failure, competence, and confidence. After all, just because you’re all working towards the same goal doesn’t mean you’re all of the same mindset and personality in all the other areas outside that. You’ll (hopefully) discover how much more worth there is to curiosity and awareness of oneself than judgement – because there are few things more subjective than the adjudicating of an Irish dance performance. Umpires don’t give you an extra strike because they think you have a goofy batting stance, and referees don’t take away points if you don’t have a textbook jumpshot. Irish dance judges sure do, though, and that’s why you soon learn you can’t control anything beyond your own dancing. Did you do your best? Are you better than you were this time last month? Great, that’s all that matters.

*Fun before performing with the Evansville Philharmonic*

Then again, maybe it’s none of this. That’s fine, too. You can invest as much or as little as you want. You can do it for its own sake. And as we often remind ourselves, beyond the pageantry and the singlemindedness of competition and perhaps the frustration of attempting new things as an adult, at the end of the day this is supposed to be folk dancing with friends. It’s supposed to be fun.

Spoiler alert – it is.

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