Dancing with the Devil – An Irishman’s Diary about jigs, jazz, and Japanese Butoh

It’s cheering to see that the Down With Jazz festival (downwithjazz.ie) has become an established fixture in the Irish calendar. The 2015 instalment takes place next weekend in Dublin’s Temple Bar, with many of Ireland’s best musicians performing, backed as usual by the sound of Eamon de Valera turning in his grave.

The event takes its name from a slogan in a 1934 anti-jazz campaign in Leitrim. This now sounds like a plot from Father Ted, but it was led by a real-life priest, Peter Conifrey, who believed jazz to be an "engine of hell", imported here from abroad to do the devil's work.

De Valera didn’t attend the crusading march in Mohill, but he did send a representative and a letter of support. And his government would soon pass the Public Dance Halls Act 1935, curbing the country’s many unlicensed dances, or “orgies of dissipation”, as an official report had called them.

This year’s Down With Jazz celebrates the 80th anniversary of that act. So doing, its line-up includes a jazz band whose one-word name probably encapsulates the fears of 1930s moralists. The group in question fuses hip hop with Irish traditional music, which largely explains that name. Even so, the fact remains that people attending the festival on Saturday next will be getting “Jiggy”, (among other acts), which must be what poor Fr Conifrey dreaded.

Now that the anti-jazz campaign has been ironically immortalised, however, I wonder if there’s a gap in the market for another commemoration, broadly similar, of a 90th anniversary that falls later this year.

I refer to the Catholic bishops’ famous 1925 letter on the evils of dancing. Which, like the alleged excesses that led to the 1935 Act, makes you wonder what our parents’ and grandparents’ generations were getting up to in those years, to provoke such a backlash from the authorities.

Whatever it was, the bishops were sufficiently alarmed to question whether Ireland could much longer retain the reputation that “the chivalrous honour of Irish boys and the Christian reserve of Irish maidens” had won it.

This, they believed, was under attack from a three-pronged coalition of “pictures and papers and drink”. But a fourth evil, the dancehall, was worst of all. As the letter warned, it had led “many a good, innocent girl into sin, shame and scandal, and set her unwary feet on the road that leads to perdition”.

Although the bishops were concerned about all forms of dancing, especially at night, they were marginally more relaxed about the native Irish sort. This was in part because it was anything but relaxed. As the letter put it, "it is no small commendation of Irish dances that they cannot be danced for long hours". The problem, rather, was "imported dances of an evil kind". And commanding that the letter be read from the pulpits every three months from then on, the bishops also pledged to consult "responsible parishioners" about practical solutions. As anyone who saw Ken Loach film Jimmy's Hall will know, Leitrim would again be on the front line.

The bishops were not alone in their worries. Even the aforementioned "papers" joined the crusade. In 1928, that other influential pulpit, The Irish Times editorial column, thundered about "the baleful effects of drink and low dancing" on morals, or more particularly, on "rural morals".

The writer urged “further restrictions on the sale of drinks, a remorseless war on the poteen industry, the strict supervision of dance halls, and the banning (by law if necessary) of all-night dances”. This, he suggested, “would abolish many inducements to sexual vice”.

Getting back to the letter, however, it surely provides the basis for a 90th anniversary commemorative event. I’m no impresario, but I’d be confident a festival called “Imported Dances of an Evil Kind” would have no trouble selling tickets, especially in Mohill.

In the meantime, the actual (and annual) Dublin Dance Festival got under way this week. It continues till the end of May. And among the imported dances, evil and otherwise, this year will be a week of performances and workshops involving Japanese Butoh, an avant-garde art form developed in the late 1950s and now practised all over the world.

It’s hard to describe Butoh, so I’ll quote the Japanese embassy’s press release, which speaks of dancers “embracing gravity [while aspiring] to reach the essence of the human spirit”. This sounds like something the ghosts of the 1925 bishops will need to monitor closely. They can find out more at movingbodiesbutohfestival.com.

@FrankmcnallyIT