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| Robin Slater, showman, flutist, former dancer and co-producer of 2006's Mystical Ireland and last year's Eire the Show, provides a unique perspective on modern Ireland and Irish history. | |||
Where shall we start? Married Dearbhail, in the year 2000, 18th of June. And she's never let me forget it.
I was a dancer, really — a professional ballet dancer for six or seven years. And then I went into do musical theatre. And then I stopped dancing for a long, long time, and performing.
When I met Dearbhail I started getting interested in Irish instruments and music. Started to play traditional Irish music and it's a lot different than what I was used to. Because classically trained, I was used to having music in front of me and it was a whole different ball game to be able to learn music by ear.
And that was challenging for me. And even playing, and doing concerts with Dearbhail was daunting because I didn't have any notes in front of me.
It's interesting because the Irish tradition is that they hand all this music down from the eighth century and play it by ear. I've seen Dearbhail with her harp students doing the tunes that you see played here and and it's like, "Okay, play the first three notes, repeat and repeat. Have you got it? Okay, now we'll go on." And there's no music in front of them, and the next thing they're performing and doing it as an ensemble. So it's a whole different tradition from what I was brought up to do.
With Irish broom dancing — when they didn't have entertainment, they didn't have dance floors and what they used to do is this: there was a double door on the cottages and they used to take the top half off and they'd have one to keep the chickens from coming in, so they'd open the top half.
They'd take that top half and throw it right on the floor and they'd dance. They'd do what's known as sean nos dancing, which translated means "old style." And then they'd grab a broom and just dance with it. And that was just their form of entertainment. And you know, it can be as subtle as just lying the broom on the floor and and just doing a little step over it or as elaborate as putting it into a Hollywood production. It's whatever you want and how much money do you have?
But it's a fun tradition and it's still performed by professional sean nos dancers in Ireland. And again, the singing, the lilting, the sean nos singing, is still part of the culture and still very much alive. And there's still a lot of competitions, sean nos dancing — just shuffling of the feet — and then from that I suppose came the Irish dancing, and to what we know now as the Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. I suppose Michael Flatley's opened up a lot of doors for Irish dancers to make a profession out of what was just a fun thing to do when times were bad ... when the Brits invaded. Damn them Brits!
I mean, Dearbhail has some great stories. She was telling somebody the other week that when England invaded Ireland, people were told that they couldn't speak Irish. And from that came the hedge schools where the people of Ireland decided to keep this language alive and they tried to teach Irish to their kids in the ditches and that was called hedge school.
And her grandfather actually had a piece of wood tied around his neck with a piece of string and if he was caught speaking Irish a notch would be put in it. And when that piece of wood was full he'd get a beating. It was fairly horrific times.
I mean, Dearbhail's father built his own house and before he died he told me when he got married he would go to England to earn the money. And he'd go to England for maybe five or six months and then come back and build a little bit more of his house. All the work for the Irish people was in England.
And, The Troubles with Northern Ireland — we speak to a lot of Americans here and they have a false impression of it. They really believe that it's a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. And to some extent you can say that it is. But what they are fighting over is land. Because Ireland wanted all of its island back. They were only handed back 75 percent of it, and they said, like, in 1816, [the British government] said, "You can have this much back, and we'll give you the rest back as long as you don't form a government," and that's very hard to do.
So they set up a government in Dublin and [the British] said, "That's it. We're not giving you the rest back," and ever since then there's been turmoil and trouble. Snd there's English people living up in the North who were born there and they have every right to be there and as far as they are concerned it's Great Britain. And yet you have Irish people up there saying, "This was never Great Britain, this was Ireland." And it just so happens that the English people were more or less Protestant and, you know, the Republic is 95 percent Roman Catholic so you've got those troubles going on. And that's what the flag represents. The green is for the Republic, the orange is for the North and the white represents the peace we would like between the two countries. There. A bit of history for you.
And of course, the money's changed. We used to have our own currency. And now we have the euro. And the euro is great for us because we can travel France, Portugal, Italy, Greece, all around Europe and not have to change any of our money yet we travel an hour and a half north of where we live and we have to change it to sterling. It just doesn't make sense.
Went to Zurich in March [2006]. Dearbhail was asked [by the ambassador of Ireland] to represent Ireland for Zurich so we went there for St. Patrick's Day.
But I like my life. It's good fun. And long may we come back.
May 19, 2006
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Viewpoint • Recent Articles • The Irish Cottage of Galena Jack Coulter • The Frank O'Dowd Pub Basil Conroy • Father of the Games Bill Gillies • From Britain to Ireland Robin Slater • Ireland to America Dearbhail Finnegan • The Homestead Pickers Dearbhail Finnegan |
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• MidwestIrish.com is a part of Lucky13Studios Design Family. For more information, see JoshuaHeston.com•
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| BRANSON — Backstage and between shows, Robin Slater, co-producer and emcee of Mystical Ireland discusses all things Irish. |
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