Dancing
We talked in the podcast about the idea that Gerry and Chris may have met at a festival dance, and one imagines that traditonally many would go to the local dance with the hope of meeting a mate. There is a wonderful note in the programme for the National Theatre production that tells of a real Lughnasa dancing competition in County Donegal where the prize for the best male dancer was his choice of bride from the female contestants. So it can literally happen! It is also clear from Maggie’s vibrant description of the dance competition that she and Bernie O’Donnell competed in years ago, that romantic partnerships can be formed in the crucible of such events.

Dance is more than a social ritual, however. It is imbued with other meanings in the play, including its spiritual purpose in the pagan performances in Africa that Jack describes, or the darker energies that it may release in the more local versions in the hills in Donegal. In this context it can represents a challenge to the established order, particularly to the decorum of prescribed Christian behaviour. As the stage directions suggest when they describe the sisters’ dance as becoming a “frantic dervish”, with a “near hysteria being induced” , so that “there is a sense of order being consciously subverted.”.

In personal terms it offers a non-verbal expression of deeply felt desire or grief for frustrated hopes. For Chris and Gerry, for example, it is clearly one of the ways that they manifest their passion. For the others it may be more of an unconscious release of pain or even suppressed anger or determination about their thwarted dreams. Again the stage directions point this way, describing Maggie’s face when she is dancing as “animated by a look of defiance, or aggression”, and their uninhibited movement as “a pattern of action…that is out of character and at the same time ominous of some deep and true emotion.”

It is a release that reaches a level within and beyond that Michael describes so poetically in his final summation: “Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement – as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes…”.