Irish Moves

Irish Moves is a historical book with a difference. From Ninette de Valois to Jean Butler and Tom Hickey, it showcases - and in some cases salvages - the stories of Ireland's unsung movers: actors, dancers, choreographers, playwrights, directors, and the few academics who dare to go where no words have gone before. Focussing on people who value what's in between the words as much as the words themselves, it features stories of the creative journeys taken by artists who have devoted their lives to physical expression, despite the fact that their medium was ignored, or even erased from memory. An in-depth introductory essay points up how the zeitgeist finds expression in this new history of dance and theatre in Ireland through the eyes of practitioners, historians, and sociologists, and the as yet unpublished lost chapter of Modern Dance in Ireland in the 1940's. The Abbey School of Ballet is also salvaged from obscurity with a memoir and unpublished images from the 1920's, '30's and '40's. Irish Moves not only provides a map of dance and physical theatre in Ireland, but is also a meditation on our complicated attitude to the body as a nation. It offers surprising and sometim