Lord only knows how ordinary decent set-dancers in the west of Ireland are going to receive Alan Gilsenan's fizzy, sharply ironic documentary Emerald Shoes tomorrow night. It outlines the evolution of the dance that begat Riverdance, with all its showbiz pyrotechnics and awesome Celtic shock-troops - or "Flying Squads" as they are sometimes referred to in the business.
Commissioned by UTV for the ITV network, the documentary is less a history of traditional Irish dance, than an often humorous scan of perceptions of the culture over the last century, and the last 30 or 40 years in particular.
Gilsenan: "I wasn't an aficionado or even a particular fan of Irish dance, so I started from scratch. It was never going to be an academic study, so I tried to broaden out the canvas and interview people like John Kelly who grew up with an awareness of music, but would have had a view of Irish dance as a teenager that I think a lot of us would have had. Love it or loathe it, Riverdance opened up a world which effectively is sort of hermetically sealed - and always has been."
Others chipping in their tuppence-halfpenny include Victoria White, arts editor of this newspaper, singer Paul Brady, a very cynical B.P. Fallon, one-time showband shark Albert Reynolds, and veteran comic Dave Allen, gagging that ceilis looked like they evolved from a way of killing cockroaches in time to music.
Thankfully, Gilsenan also consulted established Irish dance teachers like John Cullinane, Joe O'Donovan, Josephine MacNamara and the 93-year-old tap teacher Jimmy Payne, whose son and daughter demonstrate how the Ur-history of black tap is braided together with that of Irish dancing.
The origins of Irish folk dance are lost in the mists of time, but Cullinane maintains there are three landmarks in the history: the foreign dancing masters who arrived to teach quadrilles, hornpipes and such-like in the 18th century; the foundation of the Gaelic League in the 1890s with its costumed Oireachtases - and Michael Flatley.
Gilsenan's film makes much of the oldstyle tea-and-sandwiches set dancing and ceili culture as church-sterilised social engineering. It also satirises the perversity of humourless adjudicators scrutinising young boys earnestly flying around in kilts, with their fists bunched rigid by their sides. "Effectively, Irish dance had become unhip in the 1960s and 1970s - even while the music was thriving," says Gilsenan. "But the emigrant communities actually preserved in aspic these traditions which had begun to die out here."
Indeed, maybe we should now call it Irish-American dancing. Gilsenan took some cautionary footage of the World Championships in Ennis, with the ringlet-permed sproglets in their Celtic spangled skirts, wired up with the manic obsession of so many Olga Korbuts. He also visited Dennis Dennehy's Irish dance school in Chicago, where a young Flatley first dreamed of taking an Irish-dancing show to Broadway. "I remember sitting in on classes in the Dennehy school, where Flatley would have started off, and I never saw any joy or smiles. They just came and they trained very hard. It was almost an athletic pursuit."
Indeed, in her interview, Jean Butler refers to Irish dancing quite unself-consciously as a sport. She remembered her very first Irish dance class, when a class of fouryear olds were lined up, feet full out, eyes forward, fists by the sides - and ordered to remain like that "until someone flinched."
Weird scenes. Gilsenan: "Usually when you make a documentary, no matter how alien the territory, you begin to develop some understanding and an empathy for the people, whether they're Buddhist monks, prisoners, whatever. But this was the first time I ever made a film and didn't find that happening. I could fall in love with the dance to a degree, but I found the world of competitive Irish dancing a very cold kind of place to be."
Gilsenan didn't interview Michael Flatley, more's the pity, because although the documentary credits him absolutely for the choreographic concept, it steers well clear of the legalities which surrounded his departure from the Riverdance show he had been instrumental in creating. Gilsenan comments: "Yes, but to a mainstream British audience, the inner politics of Riverdance is of no interest." But what about the front-page tabloid headlines of the time? "Look, we were doing the story of Irish dance. If you wanted, you could probably make a Riverdance Babylon documentary, which would probably be quite grotesque . . . "
Mind you, there is one interview scene in which Jean Butler remarks on the difficulties of working alongside such a colossal ego as Flatley's. It's actually a kind of chilling moment in the film. "She was very passionate about that, and it was the first interview she had done since she left the whole Riverdance thing, and therefore I felt it was very important to let her have her say. There was a lot of hurt there, and the fact that she decided to air it is a statement in itself. It wasn't an off-the-cuff remark, put it that way.
"But while Jean is definitely critical of him, clearly she and most people acknowledge that he is a towering presence in the Irish dance world - you don't have to know him or like him to accept that. I think Victoria White said that he took the leap which pushed the whole thing along, and I hope it's clear in the film that we credited him for that.
"Personally, I admire him as a performer, and he was very positive about our project and very happy to be interviewed. But we had a tight production schedule of 15 days, and at the time he had just finished Feet of Flames and his schedule was hysterical. He was in the West Indies, trying to write the script for a feature film, and, in the end, we just ran out of time. But he gave us footage from Feet of Flames and allowed us use various footage of him. "And while all his material is all owned and copyrighted, the Riverdance organisation felt it wasn't in their interest to help us in any way, because they're working on various documentary projects themselves. They actually refused us permission to even use 30 seconds of Riverdance, or do an interview with any of the participants . . . "
Still, Gilsenan has hoovered up plenty of other gems, such as young sean nos shuffler Joe Neachtan, tapping it out in a Connemara pub, or the boy Dan McKiernan who, in Gilsenan's words, "exemplifies in some real, down-to-earth way the effect that Flatley has had on Irish dance. He's very impressive."
Indeed. Watching the boy hopping, whirling and high-stepping around his living room in Athboy, alone in front of his Michael Flatley video, you really wonder what has the culture come to - let alone where the hell it's going next.
Emerald Shoes is on UTV tomorrow at 10.45 p.m.