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The legs in Dan O’Connell’s pub have danced a million miles. Around and around the floor battering out jigs and polkas, slides and mazurkas, swinging and stomping into heavenly raptures. In this public house in Knocknagree the dancers topping their seventies and eighties are only in their prime. Like one woman who buried three husbands said to me, “Sure ‘tis as easy to say prayers for three husbands as for two. If ye lose one, get out on that dance floor and get ye another!”

Lush, mountainous Munster is the Irish province of the supernatural. The very breasts of the pagan Irish mother goddess Anann rise over the countryside near Rathmore. These 2,200-foot high twin mounds topped by stone cairn “nipples” are shapely even by Playboy standards. But they didn’t seduce Cromwell’s soldiers. After massacres from Drogheda to Galway, Cromwell regarded Sliabh Luachra’s mountainous boggy land too insignificant to conquer. So it remained a sanctuary for Irish mysticism, Republicanism, Gaelic poetry - and set dancing!

Irish set dancing should not be confused with the high-stepping flashy solo step dancing which inspired Vaudeville tap dancing and has Riverdance and Lord of the Dance selling out venues around the world. Neither does it resemble the hoppity-skippity ceili dancing dragged out with the green beer every Saint Patrick’s Day. Set dancing is a wild country hybrid of the stately French quadrilles popular in Napoleon’s Paris and brought to Ireland by General Wellington’s soldiers. One set dance of four couples in a square can last for 30 minutes, with 3-6 figures of vigorous polkas, slides, hornpipes, reels, and sweaty panting pauses in between.

In Sliabh Luachra, land of master fiddlers Denis Murphy, Julia Clifford and Padraig O’Keefe, set dancing is as essential to life as breathing. Local accordion master Johnny O’Leary impressed this upon me with the example of how the old blind and lame fiddle teacher Tom Billy Murphy who travelled the region on a donkey, could tell which crowd was out dancing by the battering of their feet! “He was tee-to-tally blind, ” said Johnny, “Yet if he’d meet ye, he’d know ye forever again by yer footsteps.”

I learned set dancing in a week of classes at Miltown Malbay, County Clare, where every July a mad traffic jam of tractors and hay balers, rental Renault and clunky Morris Minors, chip vans, caravans and donkey carts gathers for the annual Willie Clancy Summer School (Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy). Where Drowsy Maggie and the Rakish Paddy and the Lilting Banshee and the Cow That Ate the Blanket - and all the other great old Irish tunes that you can think of - blast from bagpipes, ring from fiddles, wheeze from melodeons, thunder off goatskin bodhrans at all hours godly and ungodly. And where hundreds of pairs of shoes get worn out dancing.

Our motley group of Yanks, Germans and Aussies had started out hobbling and stumbling, but by week’s end were dancing as merrily as bees round a cask. Eager to test our steps on local pub floors, we sauntered out to find them so packed that the drinkers were standing on one leg like storks. So we ended up in Knock-na-Gree at Dan O’Connell’s, where I caused the wildest dancing accident that pub has ever seen.
I was dancing with one of the best, 80-something Dan O’Keefe. His thin wide grin and soft voice still charmed “the girruls.” And oh, was he light and wiry. We were doing a Cashel set - or was it a Clare Lancers? - I was twirling Dan and he was twirling me, when suddenly I felt my billowy red shirt, which one old-timer said resembled the bellows of a Paoli Soprani accordion, being yanked off me.

My reflex was to yank back, not really believing that this could be happening in a public house filled with witnesses. I gripped the elastic waistband, but the tugs continued, intent on disrobing me. Then Dan grabbed me for a swing, and while I held my skirt, and Dan, I watched horrified as the dancer to my right fell toward me, dragging his partner along, hopping like a pogo stick on one leg.

My eyes seized upon the preposterous situation: the poor man’s legs had been lassoed together by my skirt. We stopped our stepping to allow him to unfurl himself. Then the cause of this queer rodeo hung there in plain view: nailed through the hem of my gauzy Indian skirt was his partner’s high-heeled shoe. The spike of her high heel had caught in my skirt. The skirt with the heel attached had whirled between his legs, lassoing him like a calf, while his dance partner wondered what happened to her shoe! The band played on, but our set of eight was crippled by laughter.

I guess we broke at least a few of the rules of ballroom etiquette described in F. J. Mainey’s ‘The Old Time Dancers' Handbook’:

-Pay respectful attention of elderly persons.
-It is not correct to romp in dancing.
-It is not correct to exhibit any symptoms of dissatisfaction in the ballroom.

We should add to this “Never polka in high-heel spikes.” But in Ireland rules, if not shoes, are made to be broken.

The set dancing revival that has swept Ireland, North America and England off its feet in the last decade has done wonders for alcoholism, loneliness and physical fitness. While dancing, it’s impossible to drink. While dancing one gets aerobically fit whether one means to or not. While dancing to erotic hornpipes - ahh, the tangle and whirl of hair and flesh - one has the fleeting, carefully controlled chance to grab flesh, bump breast, seduce and be seduced, make eyes, make passes - and then forget that any of it ever happened.
Dancing with someone gives you instant knowledge of that person. How confident or shy. How sensual or repressed. How generous or stingy. How lighthearted or dull. How quick-witted or thick. Happy or sad. Gawky or poised. Suspicious or trusting. How available or not. It’s amazing but true.

One of my favorite Irish songs was composed in the 1870’s by a Galway poet named Gavin. In 1980 the Irish group The Bards added verses and popularized it as “Lannigan’s Ball.” It features a dancing accident rather like my own, which ended in a brawl...

The boys were as merry, the girls all hearty,
Dancin’ away in couples and groups,
Till an accident happened; Young Terence McCarty
He put his right leg through Miss Finnerty’s hoops.
Her sweetheart Ned Morgan, so powerful and able,
When he saw his fair colleen stretched by the wall
He tore the left leg from under the table
And smashed all the dishes at Lannigan’s Ball.
O’Casey the piper he nearly got strangled,
They squeezed up his pipes bellows, chanters and all,
The girls in their ribbons they all got entangled
And that put an end to Lannigan’s Ball.

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