As one of the original stars and a choreographer of major productions like “Riverdance” and “Dancing on Dangerous Ground” who has trod the boards at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and Apollo Theatre in Manchester, England, Jean Butler knows all about high-octane Irish dance performances in big venues with massive audiences. 

But one of her most compelling Irish dance experiences took place not long ago in a far smaller, more intimate setting – and she was more of an observer than a participant. 

Butler watched as the ever-elegant Joan McNiff Cass, a beloved New York Irish dance teacher just shy of 80, demonstrated a dance that her brothers Cyril and Peter had choreographed for her when she was a young child growing up in Belfast.  

“Something happened in that room,” recalls Butler. “It was as if time were unfolding right in front of us: You could see her younger self pushing through and meeting her older self as she went through the dance. It was so powerful.”

But this event did not take place by happenstance. It occurred at the first Our Steps Archive Residency at the Jerome Robbin’s Dance Division for the New York Public Library in 2018, an event Butler had organized through her New York City-based non-profit organization, Our Steps, which is dedicated to expanding the way we think about Irish dance. 

The creation of the Our Steps video archive and oral history collection, says Butler, will enable current and future generations of Irish dance students, performers, choreographers, teachers, and aficionados to gain a greater understanding of the tradition and the people who have dedicated their lives to passing it on.

Butler will talk about Our Steps and its mission on May 1 at the Irish Cultural Centre of Greater Boston in Canton. In addition to describing its origin and activities, she will share some clips from the video archive and oral history collection, and take part in a Q&A session. Get tickets and other details here, 

“It is an interactive talk with lots of clips from the archive to date,” she says. “We’ve spent six years creating Our Steps, Our Story: An Irish Dance Legacy Archive, and now I’m trying to invite people into the work we have done – to engage with the materials as a creative impulse for other work. My intention in creating the archive is, and always was, that it be used; that people would find it a fascinating resource, whether perusing an oral history or diving into the hours of video footage we have.”

In the days following her talk, Butler and Our Steps’ Oral History Director Emma Brown will conduct oral history interviews at the Cultural Centre, inviting veteran Irish dance teachers and performers from around New England to share for posterity their history, experiences, and revelations to expand the Our Steps oral history collection, which currently has more than 60 interviews.

“Our Steps is about creating a new space for Irish dance, not about shows or competitions. It’s about a shared intergenerational learning experience unlike any other in Irish dance. We set up a safe, comfortable environment and then I press ‘record.’”

While her primary title is artistic director, Butler quips that she “wears all the hats” at Our Steps, although she is quick to credit the work of the organization’s board and its various consultants. This is not an undertaking she’d been planning for years: Our Steps, she says, was born of necessity. 

Several years ago, while an assistant professor of Irish Studies at New York University, Butler created a course on the history and evolution of Irish dance – and found there were little or no resources with which to teach.

“At that time, there was no canon of books written on Irish dance and no available and accessible archive to point students toward,” she says. Compounding this discovery was the death, in a short span of time, of four older, well-respected New York-based Irish dance teachers and adjudicators.

“I was struck by the fact that all they had created – their steps, their methodology, their personal histories in Irish dance – was just gone. Those men of that generation were part of the Irish dance culture I grew up with, and I realized that if we didn’t create some kind of resource, some way of preserving what they had done, their contribution to the culture and the larger history of Irish dance may be forgotten.

“It is important to say there has been other archival work done on Irish dance, very important work, but I felt there were gaps which needed filling. Our Steps is dedicated to exploring not only the steps and the techniques and so on, but to unearth the whole idea of Irishness and the dancing body: to commemorate and celebrate our collective dance history. My hope for the archive is that other dance forms, other art forms, connect and collaborate with our rich, unknown history.”

While ideas and comments on teaching, practice and performance techniques are certainly important, Butler says, it’s critical to understand that Irish dance has a metaphysical dimension as well.

“As dancers, we don’t know what we absorb. These dances live in our bodies. On several occasions during these archival residencies, we’ve had people do dances they didn’t know they knew – dances that were never taught to them. In our Toronto Archive Residency in 2023, Ciaran Plummer – a fantastic champion dancer – got up and did his brother’s set dance, which he never danced before: The music played and he just danced it.

“This also happened to me in our New York Archive Residency in 2018: My sister Cara, an incredible dancer and performer, was remembering the step of Donny Golden’s famous ‘Planxty Davis,’ which she was about to teach. I had never danced ‘Planxty’ and as far I remember, I was never taught it either. But I had watched her do it a thousand times. And somehow, I got up and just danced it with her. It’s extraordinary how we don’t even know what we’re absorbing and retaining. We don’t know what we know!” 

In conversation with Butler, it seems only natural to bring up “Riverdance,” which is marking its 30th anniversary year (in early April, its latest iteration, “Riverdance: The New Generation,” played locally at the Boch Center). Butler, however, demurs at offering insights into its worldwide popularity and staying power. As she points out, she was part of the original creative team and toured for just over a span of three years – all of which is now more than 35 years ago (she also was in the seven-minute piece at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest that was the basis for the show).

What’s more, for Butler those “Riverdance” years represent only a small part of what’s been a very full and rewarding career. Since 2003, she has been working in a contemporary dance context, with commissions, residencies, and presentations from the Abbey Theatre, Danspace Project, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Kennedy Center, the Joyce Theater, and Seamus Heaney Homeplace, among others, and collaborated with classical musicians, visual artists, poets, and filmmakers.

In addition to NYU, Butler has taught through the Princeton Atelier program, held a fellowship in Creative Practice from University College Dublin and served as external examiner of the bachelor’s degree program in traditional Irish music and dance at the University of Limerick Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. 

Her various activities have earned her some notable honors, including the Outstanding Contribution to Arts & Culture Alumni Award from the University of Limerick, the Spirit of Ireland Award by the Irish Arts Center in New York, induction into the Irish American Hall of Fame, and TG4’s Gradam Ceoil lifetime achievement award in May 2024.  

Perhaps the best thing about Our Steps, says Butler, is that it has expanded her own understanding about Irish dance.

“Every time I do an oral history interview or an archive residency, I learn something new,” she says. “There are so many facets to Irish dance: How we teach it, how we learn it, what we retain and why, where and how we locate dance in our lives. These are important things not just for the Irish dance community, but also for other people so they can understand where we’ve come from, and where Irish dance has taken us.”

Our Steps, Our Story: An Irish Dance Legacy Archive can be accessed through the Jerome Robbins Dance Division for the New York Public for Library for the Performing Arts.

To find out more about Our Steps, see www.our-steps.com