Ahead of Deiseil: Dancing in Time coming to Latheron, Reay & Kirkwall, we caught up with the team behind the show to find out more about the history of stepdance in Scotland, its revival, and why village halls are the perfect setting for this story of friendship, culture and tradition.
There’s a lot of fascinating academic research which has been done into the history of dance in Scotland over the centuries. But as we say in the show, the everyday is easily lost, and until the very recent advent of video recording it was very difficult to record the nuance of dance.
In older records there’s often just a reference to dance, so it’s not absolutely clear what is being referred to — in the way that young people today would describe going out dancing and wouldn’t specify exactly what they’re doing because everyone knows what is meant.
However, in the 1980s when stepdance was taught in Scotland by dancers from Cape Breton, there were older people in various parts of the country who remembered seeing those same steps done by their parents or grandparents. There are also clues in song lyrics, poetry and archive recordings that the rhythm of the steps was important, even as part of social dancing.
Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o’ Riches is a wonderful collection of thousands of oral recordings and that includes many stories of dancing recorded from the 1930s onwards. For example, there’s a lovely recording from Orkney of Ethel Findlater talking about children learning dance steps from their parents and singing tunes to dance to.
As we’ve been travelling around the country with the show, we’ve had rich Q&A discussions with audiences and somebody recently suggested that there is a ‘reinfusing’ of stepdance happening in Scotland, which we really liked as an image.
Stepdance didn’t fully disappear, it was hidden and evolved with modernity, as with many aspects of traditional culture. You realise listening to the archival material and talking to people today that people often take for granted traditional culture, as it is so much part of the fabric of life.
In Galloway, someone told us there was a family history of stepdance but it wasn’t passed on as it wasn’t thought to be important, and of course that’s also been a big part of the loss of Gaelic across Scotland — people were made to feel that their own culture was irrelevant in the modern world.
It makes you realise how important it is to ensure these living traditions are valued and that people are supported to pass them on to the next generation.
The show is quite unusual as a piece of theatre — the story is told through the dance and music just as much as through the words spoken by us.
There’s a set of tunes and steps near the start of the show which demonstrates the start of our stepdance journey, learning to dance and play from Cape Bretoners who came to teach in Scotland in the late 80s and early 90s.
There’s also a scene where we play on the Gaelic learning journey that many have embarked on in recent years via the Duolingo app. This is followed by a tune Amy wrote, with Alison dancing steps of her own invention, an example of what modern stepdance and its music looks like in Scotland today.
In terms of Gaelic song, you’ll hear singers including Mary Ann Kennedy and Allan MacDonald on the soundtrack. The soundtrack emerged out of our research when we were making the show and we realised how important it was to include more voices than our own in the telling of this story.
We started thinking about the show 3 years ago when we realised we had reached a very significant ‘paliversary’. We’d been friends for 25 years — the early years of our friendship coincided with the revival of stepdance in Scotland, and we were both part of The Scottish Stepdance Company which pioneered stepdance performance in Scotland in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The show was borne from a dual desire to get back to making creative work together, and to share the story of stepdance in Scotland more widely, with the hopes of connecting with more people who’d like to teach and learn the tradition, and find the same joy in it that we have done together.
We’ve been really lucky to work with Gerry Mulgrew, who directed the show and co-created it with us in a very organic and unconventional process.
Gerry co-founded Communicado Theatre Company in the 1980s, which together with 7:84 was the first company to take theatre out of the cities and into rural areas. All three of us knew that we wanted to make a show for village halls, leaning into the ceilidh culture that stepdance is part of, where communities would traditionally come together to dance, sing and share tunes and stories.
The show is in the round so we really get to see the audience and feel part of something together. There’s much less of a ‘fourth wall’ in village hall performances — it’s a collective experience, which is wholly appropriate for a show about stepdance.
We’re often treated to some pretty incredible home baking too!
We got a piece of feedback in Skye last weekend that said, “I felt like I discovered my roots and my roots wanted to dance!”
This is a sentiment echoed in much of the feedback we’ve collected on tour. People talk about enjoying feeling the rhythm of the dance in their seat and lots of people want to try stepdance after seeing the show.
Have you ever tapped your foot to a tune or song? Percussive dance is an innate human impulse, it’s a collective experience you won’t forget.
And if you enjoy history, song, a light bit of comedy, and something completely new that at the same time will feel comfortingly familiar, you’ll enjoy our show!
Deiseil: Dancing in Time is a chance to experience this living tradition up close — through music, movement, song, storytelling and a little bit of humour. Whether stepdance is part of your heritage or completely new to you, come along in Caithness or Orkney and discover a story that might feel more familiar than you expect.
📅 Wednesday 7 October — Latheron Hall
📅 Thursday 8 October — Reay Hall
📅 Friday 9 October — St Magnus, Kirkwall
For tickets, please click here
