Chicago calling

Trinity are the lords of the dance

by Jeffrey Gantz

Take from Riverdance the glitz, the glitter, the amplification, the Las Vegas flash, and Michael Flatley's manly chest and you have...Trinity Irish Dance Company. At least, that was the hype that preceded the company's Boston debut at the Emerson Majestic last week. No frills, no gimmicks, just the genuine article, old-fashioned Irish stepdancing.

Well, it's not quite that simple. "Trinity" conjures up Dublin, Trinity College, the Book of Kells, etc. Whereas these fresh-faced colleens (there was just one male dancer, the fabulous Darren Smith, in the touring troupe) are actually from Chicago, from Mark Howard's Trinity Academy of Irish Dance. They're not even all Irish-American: the troupe included dancers named Kowalski and Prokopij. Howard himself speaks with no trace of an Irish accent, though he was born in Yorkshire of Irish parents.

Of course, Irish is as Irish does -- and nothing could make that plainer than the flabbergasting footwork of Natalie "I Can't Believe She's Not Irish" Sliwinski. Howard founded his academy in 1979, after attending the same stepdance school as Himself, Michael Flatley; the company followed in 1990, to give his dancers an alternative to the competition circuit. Flatley, it appears, has not been overgenerous in owning up to Howard's influence, but one look at what Howard calls Trinity's "progressive Irish dance," with its angular, athletic arm movements and geometric patterns, and it's clear he had a major part in making Riverdance possible.

And for all the adulation the media have heaped on Trinity at Riverdance's expense, the two aren't so very different. Consider Trinity's opener at the Majestic, "The Mist": a dry-ice fogbank, women on the floor making patterns in the air with their legs (à la synchronized swimmers, or the June Taylor Dancers on the old Jackie Gleason show), and, when the air cleared, women in lavender spandex skipping about to an Altan-like 6/8 jig (this on top of a pre-curtain helping of Clannad's "Croí Cróga") beneath a double-exposed moon, like W.B. Yeats's black cat Minnaloushe. "Blackthorn," a stomping 12/8 jig for a quartet in sleeveless black dresses, brought everyone back to earth, proving that the ladies of Trinity, Irish and otherwise, can step with the best.

For "Step About," the rest of the company re-emerged, some in sleeveless black, some in colors, Darren Smith in black T-shirt and kilt. They'd come forward in waves of two and three, then retreat to the half circle at the back, which whooped and clapped with hands held high -- you might have wandered into a hooley in the hills of Connemara. The live trio of musicians introduced themselves, and after the usual banter Brendan O'Shea sang Patrick Kavanagh's "Raglan Road" with a freedom that made Van Morrison sound restrained. "Johnny" (which Trinity premiered on The Tonight Show back in 1991) and "Just Shannon" (with Sliwinski soling on the set dance "The Downfall of Paris" before everybody broke into the reel thing) closed out the first half of the program, more whooping and clapping and jackhammer speed, the dancers left in silhouette at the end.

The second half opened in total blackness broken only by miner's headlamps, which bobbed with a mazy motion as the company danced in the dark. "The Mollies" is Howard's tribute to the Irish miners in Pennsylvania a hundred years ago, and it's easily his most inventive, audacious piece, with the company in grubby gray work clothes mixing modern dance in with the stepping before video projections of smokestacks and miners' shacks, reminders of a grim life. Dance and politics don't always make easy bedfellows -- the modern-dance sections seemed less than fresh, and I thought the scenes of prejudice and discrimination and violence verged on preachy. But the opening tableau -- those bobbing lights, and dancers whose feet you could hear but not see -- is a stunner, and you can't blame Howard and his dancers for wanting to stretch their wings. I bet Riverdance wouldn't mind having this one in its repertoire.

Also Riverdance-y were "The Dawn" ("At the dawn of May, a platoon of tall beautiful women landed on the Irish shores. Warriors all, they had come from Spain.") and, in title at least, "Celt Thunder" -- not to mention Jackie Moran's amplified bodhrán and, during the encore, the strobe lights that accompanied Darren Smith's solo. The individual pieces (including Moran's steel-wristed solo and superb uilleann-piping from Kieran O'Hare) were over too soon; so was the program, which lasted barely an hour and a half with intermission. That's part of why Riverdance and Flatley's Lord of the Dance have so many interludes: the performers need to rest their feet. Still, Trinity gave us a treasurable look at where stepdancing was before Riverdance and where it may go in the future. Fáilte romhaibh, and come back soon!