Stepping from the Roots: Irish Traditional Step Dance as Participatory Heritage

Abstract (English)

Irish step dance is viewed in this paper as a dynamic, contested heritage practice that challenges static notions of cultural "rootedness." This cultural practice has always been shaped by movement, literal and figurative, which includes colonial displacement, diaspora circulation, or ongoing reimagining of Irish identity linked to ancestral land. Instead of focusing on heritage as a fixed inheritance, I examine how step dance is practiced across institutional, communal, and diasporic spaces as a living practice. Based on ethnographic research with dancers and cultural organizers in Ireland and beyond, I argue that step dance's vitality cannot be attributed to its imagined purity. Instead, it is due to its ability to function as a shared resource, where access and reinterpretation are constantly contested.
In the paper, tensions are explored between institutional claims to "authenticity" (e.g., competitive adjudication frameworks) and grassroots efforts to reclaim step dancing as a decolonial practice (e.g. global practice). The article highlights instances in which various communities and marginalized practitioners challenge territorialized heritage logics through participatory stewardship models. The idea of restitution is rethought through the lens of step dance, which I propose as a process of revitalizing cultural practices through equitable participation, making heritage a "common good" rather than a relic.