Irish Set Dancing

On Tuesday our coordinator, Margaret, took us Irish Set Dancing. It was amazing but quite the workout. We all got dressed nicely and set out to go to the dancing place. There was one guy who was teaching all of us. We learned the basic steps first and kind of shuffled forward and backwards. The steps got more and more intense as the night went on. We thought that the dancing was only supposed to be an hour but it was more like 2-2.5 hours.

After learning all the little steps we put them together and set up in pairs. THe only problem was that there were way more girls than guys (not a shocker here in Galway). So I danced with my friend Emmy and we were put in a small circle. When we first started dancing, Emmy and I could not get the first big step down. We asked our teacher if he could help us but instead he just put us back to an older step. We were worried that if we couldn’t do one part of the dance we wouldn’t be able to do the dance in sets. However, after we saw one group dancing we had it down. Our small circle consisted of Emmy and I, Maragaret and our friend Katherine, and two random couples. The random couples were not very good. They almost took Emmy and I out numerous times with their dancing. Margaret’s husband showed up and helped us even more. Emmy and I had gotten it down so well that even some of our friends told us how good we were.

The dance was called the Kerry and you have 4 couples in a circle. You dance forward, back, onward. And you repeat this until you are in your spot again. At this point, two couple put their right hands in the middle of the circle and dance in a circle, then their left hands, and then they split back into pairs and dance together for a second. Then the dance repeats. We also learned a more complicated version of this where instead of the couples putting their hands in the middle the guy shows of his moves to his girls and the couples just do a dance.