When asked yesterday about his decision to dance at Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Michael Flatley made it clear that he had already ‘performed for many presidents.’ Of course he has. What could better capture the 1990s than the image of Mary Robinson, the first female president of Ireland, rising to her feet to applaud Flatley and Jean Butler at the debut of Riverdance at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin?
Robinson’s presence at Riverdance encapsulated the spirit of the Celtic Tiger age. Her own inauguration speech included the famous invitation: ‘I am of Ireland, come dance with me in Ireland’, which drew from a W.B Yeats poem to invoke dancing as a call to inclusivity, plurality and reconciliation. Riverdance seemed to embody the Ireland that Robinson had envisioned in her speech, reimagining old traditions, breaking down borders and representing the aesthetic of a new, modern nation.
Indeed the spirit behind the light that Robinson kept in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin for the Irish diaspora was embodied by these two Irish-American stars. Dance, after all, was everywhere in Ireland and Irish dance everywhere in the world during the decade. The fact that a dancer from Chicago came to embody the newly emerging Celtic Tiger economy seemed exactly right when the global success of Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa was followed by the overwhelming international success of Riverdance and Flatley’s later dance shows. Dancing became a potent metaphor for the globalisation of Irish culture in the period.
Looking back now on the conversations going on in the media about Riverdance in the 1990s, it’s evident that Irish dance became a way for journalists and the public to voice their mixed attitudes towards the economic boom and the rapid social changes that it brought about. The spectrum of feelings that Riverdance provoked, from rapture to discomfort, from cynicism to hopefulness, was a way for Irish audiences to express the cultural vertigo brought about by the boom years. In his capacity to inspire hatred and adulation in equal measure, Flatley became an embodiment of the ambivalence of the age.
This ambivalence may have come from the fact that Flatley was one of the first people responsible for turning Irish dance from an amateur sport into a global commodity. His charisma as a performer mapped onto his success as a businessman. Indeed, Flatley even danced onstage like an entrepreneur, capturing all of the qualities that also made him such a good impresario. He took risks, improvised, demonstrated his flexibility and skill, exploited other dance forms to bolster his own and capitalised on an Irish cultural resource previously untapped for commercial ends. His flair, skill and self-aggrandisement onstage matched his business acumen off it. Entrepreneurialism became a kind of showmanship during the Celtic Tiger and Flatley was one of the first to link money-making with performance.
Equally his rags to riches story of growing up poor in Irish-American Chicago and becoming a global success was hitched to his message of self-reliance and ambition. “Dream big enough, work hard enough”, he seemed to say, “and you too could become Michael Flatley”. As the journalist Matthew Sweet put it in the opening of Flatley’s autobiography: “Michael Flatley wants to take on the world. Then he wants to have sex with it. Then he wants to do its accounts.”
Michael Flatley reconfigured the meanings of mobility in the period. Robinson’s invitation to dance emphasised the recognition of the Irish diaspora in 1990, at a time of high unemployment and emigration. Later in the decade, Flatley turned dancing and migration into forms of aspiration. To be mobile, flexible, and unconstrained by national borders captured the energies of global capital in an era when emigration had halted and then reversed. To live like an emigrant became a lifestyle choice at a time when the Irish were no longer forced to leave Ireland.
It might seem odd then that a performer like Flatley, who has relied so heavily on his immigrant identity, would align himself with Donald Trump, notorious for his anti-immigration stance. But in other ways the connection makes a certain kind of sense. Both men, after all, trade on their business acumen and their showman-style charisma. Both cultivate exaggerated, hyper-masculine personae, combined with man-of-the-people folksiness. The ways that Flatley’s shows provoke nostalgia for the city streets where the working class share their folk dance chimes with Trump’s desire to restore America to the glory days of its industrial past.
But of course there’s a potential business case to be made for Flatley to dance at the inauguration too. Trump supporters from the rust-belt might not necessarily be dance connoisseurs, but perhaps Flatley’s combination of virtuosity and spectacle will offer exactly the right aesthetic to lure them to the theatre. Even as he may have alienated the traditionally Democrat-voting Irish Americans by supporting Trump, his shows are now almost entirely untethered to the traditions that he originally drew from, making an audience with Irish ancestry unnecessary for the appreciation of his work.
Indeed, the setting for his most recent show, Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games, couldn’t have been further removed from Ireland - it took place on an alien planet with dancers in space suits performing scenes with titles such as ‘Robo-jig’. Ireland, while a valuable guarantor of authenticity for the emphasis on new-age nostalgia in the 1990s, has since become an obstacle for Flatley’s desire for ever-growing global circulation and market share. Appealing to Trump supporters as a potentially untapped market makes complete sense when Flatley so often frames money-making as a moral enterprise.
Flatley, then, will have danced for two presidents - one who emphasised inclusivity and plurality at the beginning of the 1990s, and another who wants to build walls. This contrast is eloquent of the changing meanings of Irish dance since the heydays of the economic boom and the terrible repercussions of the crash of 2008. As Flatley, with his ruined and aging body, introduces his troupe of dancers at Trump’s inauguration, we can catch a faint whimper from a departing Celtic Tiger, limping across borders with a dance shoe in its jaws.
