Inside the World of Percussive Dance

LAST month up at the ICONS festival in Boston, I received a copy of the just released DVD Secrets of the Sole: Irish Dance Steps & Stories with Kieran Jordan featuring Kevin Doyle & Aidan Vaughan which I was looking forward to viewing.

Produced by dancer Jordan, a native of Philadelphia who has lived for a long time in Boston since attending Boston College for her undergraduate studies, it takes us inside the world of the solo percussive dance world by profiling two dancers, Doyle and Vaughan, who were formative influences on Jordan and her dancing career.

That career began as a competitive Irish step dancer in Philly who remained interested in Irish dancing in college, taking Irish Studies at BC and eventually modern dance at the University of Limerick's Irish World Music Center where she also was smitten with sean nos (old style) dancing that has became the rage in the trad music scene now in Ireland.

Besides being a very talented and inventive dancer, Jordan has a keen academic interest in Irish dance history and evolution and a journalist's eye for what is appealing about the dancing art form itself, which makes her stand out as a creative choreographer in general and as an informed narrator and interviewer on this DVD.

Both Doyle and Vaughan served as mentors for Jordan's own work and stagecraft and occasional dance partners. But more importantly for the audience, she brings them to center stage which in this case is actually her own home in Dorchester where the interviews and dance routines were filmed one Saturday earlier this year.

Each were interviewed across a small table by Jordan individually before taking to the hardwood floor later in the day to elaborate on the talking points made in the casual and low-key conversation.

As a younger performer she came across Doyle, 58, from Providence, Rhode Island who took up Irish step dancing at eight years of age from his Irish-born mother. He was also influenced by tap dancing which was a very prominent form of American dance in that era of the fifties and sixties as television featured the variety shows that carried on the vaudeville tradition of stage and screen, like that of Jimmy Cagney and the George M. Cohan musicals.

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