Ben Butler | Staff Writer
I’m a pretty lazy guy at the best of times. Sure, I do marathons, but they’re usually more of the House of Cards variety than those with Asics and singlets. I’m also not much of a dancer. I’ll blindly bop along and belt out the lyrics to ‘Shake it Off’ in Coppers like the next fellow, but my relationship with dancing has been akin to my relationship with McDonalds, only investigated when I’m drunk and in the early hours of the morning.
Despite this, I’m always imbued with this sense of wide-eyed optimism at the start of every year. Maybe it’s that I’m just back from summer, fresh from the few glorious months of freedom. Or maybe it’s that I feel I should be working, but haven’t yet been hit with heaps of assignments. So, it was the Sunday before Freshers’ Week and Conor, the Features Editor, posted in our group. I promptly decided to embrace my short span of enthusiasm and signed up for dancing.
Your top half never moves? Halfway there already
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And thus, let me take you to that fateful Wednesday, Irish dancing. Why Irish dancing? Monday was hip hop, Tuesday was contemporary, and I don’t think I’m ‘street’ or sleek enough to do either. Even having never gone to Irish college, and missing out on the ceili summers at this stage I still figured I could pull it off alright. Sure, your top half never moves, right? Halfway there already!
Wednesday, 2.50pm: In another of my new college year resolutions, I’d started using the calendar on my phone to schedule lectures and the like, with notifications popping up ten minutes before. ‘Irish Dancing Class, Good luck’. I’d been up since seven manning the Enactus stand, which doesn’t seem like a lot but you really feel being awake for seven hours when you’ve only slept for three. Luckily, Cup Cafe had provided us with coffee that day and I had pretty much hooked myself up to it like an IV drip. I stumbled up to Botany Bay and threw on the ‘danciest’ clothes I have, a tshirt, a pair of way-too-skinny-to-the-point-where-I-can-never-actually-wear-them-in-real-life sweatpants, and my Ethnic Threads hoodie. I felt like I was on the way to some sort of Bieberesque boyband audition. Since I figured the aim of this was to make me look as ridiculous as possible, we were well on the way without even setting foot in the class.
I arrive up to the class to the delight of at least the only other guy. Claire (Clare? She only introduced herself orally, and it seemed weird to ask how to spell her name) cheerily welcomed us all to the class. With a solid 10:1 girl/guy ratio, and a pretty heavy international contingent, it was shaping up to be an interesting group. We started with a brief introduction to the history of Irish dancing, and then the real stuff began. Shoulders back, feet pointed out, this was all new. Claire and the DU Dance Committee, please forgive me; what follows will be a pretty hopeless description of what we did. Having only had two and a half hours sleep the night before (a lethal combination of LawSoc night out and early morning gazebo-pitching), my brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
“Ok so if everyone could just split up into pairs…”
After a few basic ‘jigs and reels’ (I’m using jigs and reels in the most colloquial way possible: as the technical terms flew way over my head with all my focus solely on trying not to fall over), Claire put us through our paces in what I could only describe as like running through those little ladders you see at football training sessions. But, despite my inability, I was actually really enjoying it. The music is fantastic and there was a lovely atmosphere in the group. And I was just about settling into it when Claire uttered the scariest sentence that a boy in a dance class can hear: “Ok so if everyone could just split up into pairs…” AGH. Who do I go with? It’s times like this when your brain forgets that you’re a 21 year old college student and immediately reverts back to awkward 12 year old. AGH I HAVE TO HOLD HANDS WITH A GIRL, AND I STILL HAVEN’T COMPLETED GTA VICE CITY.
Luckily, like many a group work exercise in class, proximity decided the pairs. Now in tandem with a nice Erasmus student, we proceeded with the routine. Luckily, being a boy in Irish dancing is a handy enough gig, a lot of it is helping make the girl look good whilst looking equal parts exuberant and stoical.
At this stage, the class was coming to an end, and the hangover was hitting me hard, so I was happy to finish up. But I left the class feeling a little exhausted and mainly exhilarated. Chatting to Lindsay, DU Dance’s lovely Style Liason Officer, afterwards I realised that I did actually really enjoy the class.
Now that it’s October, the laziness has kicked back in, though I would definitely recommend the classes, or just getting involved with DU Dance. Lindsay, Robyn, and everyone I met on the committee were super nice and encouraging. Will I be back? Who knows, but maybe the jigs will come out next time I’m in Coppers.
Photography By Eavan Mcloughlin
