An Irishman's Diary

WHENEVER I HAVE to attend one of my daughter’s Irish dancing feiseanna – which is whenever I run out of plausible excuses not to – my first reaction on entering the hall is always the same. “Dear God!” I think: “What is with the wigs?”

I never get used the sight of these curly monstrosities, despite their ever-increasing ubiquity at the latter-day feis. But then again, the Irish dancing wig is not designed to go unnoticed. Its chief function being to bounce jauntily at the slightest provocation, the typical wig makes no attempt to blend in, never mind to look natural.

Often it lacks any aesthetic or even geometric relationship with the wearer’s head: instead just perching on top of it – sometimes in a violently different colour – in a way that makes Marge Simpson’s hairstyle look understated.

It is, I suppose, a piece of competition equipment. And in its capacity to make the person underneath it look good, it seems to belong to the same school of design as the bicycle helmet.

Which would be fair enough if dancers risked falling on their heads a lot, like jockeys. Those dense ringlets – synthetically enhanced for maximum springiness – would at worst absorb any blunt-force trauma, and at best catapult the faller back into an upright position, maybe via a series of somersaults.

But as far as I can see, nobody ever falls in this manner at a feis, so the wigs cannot be a health and safety safety issue.

No. Their use seems to have arisen purely from the suspicion that, by exaggerating every leap and pirouette, they confer a competitive edge on the user. Or at least that they cancel out the competitive edge of those born with naturally cascading heads of (preferably red) curly hair: the Maureen O’Hara lookalikes who are to Irish dancing what Kenyans are to middle-distance running.

The wigs are not yet compulsory, I think. In fact, my daughter’s dancing school is one of those bravely holding out for natural hair at underage level. But even here, the curlies now seem to be the norm, whereas we already look like the eccentrics.

As for the more senior competitions, I think it’s a bit like being a barrister. If you want to be taken seriously by the judge, you either have to wear or wig or be conspicuously good.

Even apart from the wigs, feiseanna are not places for the faint-hearted; especially men. If you’re one of those males into whom the words “Siege of Ennis” – as spoken by the band leader at a wedding –

strike terror, you should avoid feiseanna like the plague.

But then I probably don’t need to tell you this. Chances are you’re already familiar with the classic counter-manoeuvre to the Siege: the headlong retreat to the bar. So you probably know all the main Feis-avoidance techniques too, instinctively.

I’ve often reflected (from the safety of the bar) that the differing appetites of men and women, vis-a-vis dancing, is one of the small tragedies of Irish life. Women, as a rule, love to dance; while men regard most forms of dancing with suspicion, as exercises designed with the express purpose of embarrassing them.

Sometimes (again from the bar) I even feel a little sorry for those women who have to pair off with each other at weddings and other formal dancing occasions, due to the shortage of male volunteers.

And it always seems a little sad too when, eavesdropping on my daughter’s classes, I hear the students divided into “gents” and “ladies”, even though there is never a Y-chromosome among them.

The sympathy evaporates quickly at a feis, however: where, as a non-dancer, you find yourself confronted with the enemy in very large numbers. Then, suddenly, you feel like an unarmed CIA agent who has stumbled into al-Qaeda’s annual convention wearing an “I Love Uncle Sam” T-shirt.

The quasi-military aspect of the event is accentuated by the way the dancers form lines in front of the judges: the front line, which is the one performing at any given time, and the massed ranks that constantly replenish it from the rear as the under-11 hornpipe B competition gives way to the Under-11 hornpipe C grade, and so on through a seemingly endless series of permutations.

The scary thing is that, no matter how big the Feis, what you are seeing is only a small part of the vast reserve army of Irish dancers, an army that stretches from the farthest reaches of America (which I blame for the wigs, incidentally) to Australia: highly trained and ready to strike at a moment’s notice. It’s at times like this you realise that Ennis has no chance.