Irish dancing world championships winners 2024

Irish dance is more than merely a hobby or a sport, but is a distinct cultural art-form in itself, depending on who you speak to. For some, Irish dance evokes uncomfortable childhood memories of knotted hair-curlers and long afternoons spent at post-mass competitions! Taking these contested views as a point of departure, I want to argue that Irish dance, is, by its very nature, inherently geopolitical.

As a political geographer and occasional Irish dancer, I have recently been reflecting on the inter-relations between these distinct, but not entirely unrelated, forms of knowledge.

Irish dancing world championships winners list

While there have been a highly engaging and enriching litany of dance and music ethnomethodologies within cultural geography, I do not attempt to explore these here. Nor do I profess to be an expert in this area. Dance occurs in a myriad of forms across cultural and geographical space. Yet one component which remains invariable to its execution, is the performing body.

This body, with its various inner components and outer parts, endures in a perpetual state of motion and circulation. Despite this, the moving body as a performative force, rarely receives analytic attention. Short-sighted understandings of the characteristics of bodies are often reflected in the technical mechanistics of dance performance itself.

The performative qualities of dance, and its ability to articulate a socio-spatial immediacy, secure it from an unauthentic and mechanical reproducibility in an age of ever-growing technological advancement.

Oireachtas rince na cruinne 2026

Thus performing bodies, and their corporeal identities, are important conduits for political and geographical processes, and deserve our attention. As a geographer, I consider bodies to be largely reflective of the environmental conditions in which they are both produced and sustained. In this way, the state of the body, and the body of the state, are always intimately interlinked.