Feet on fire for St. Patrick's Day

There was a céilí at the Crestview Public Library last Tuesday evening, and nearly 70 people of all ages turned out for the timely celebration. With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, it mattered not if they wore orange or green: When the music started playing, the toes started tapping and pretty soon, everyone was Irish for the evening.

In fact, when it was time for the audience to join in, there were many more visitors dancing up front than there were members of the Christian Céilí Club, the evening’s special guests.

“It’s wonderful aerobic exercise,” said Trish Moye, a member of the Niceville-based club for the past four or five years. “It’s great family fun. A family can really connect when dancing.”

A céilí, pronounced KAY-lee, was a traditional Celtic community social that combined storytelling, dance, feasting and socializing into one long, fun-filled night. Today it is primarily a big dance party, where young and old members of the community connect while performing traditional dances.

Moye, who refrained from dancing due to a recent knee injury, kept the music going while members of the club demonstrated basic dance steps and performed several traditional jigs and reels. Anna and Dave Sandlin explained the traditions behind the distinctive dances.

“Everyone knew how to dance and it was done at all their gatherings,” Anna Sandlin said of traditional Irish dancing. “Everyone, young and old, did it. It was very integrated.”

Moye is living proof that Irish dance transcends the generations. She’s a spry grandmother of 60. Her granddaughter started Irish dancing when she was a toddler of 3.

“It’s never too late to start dancing,” Moye said.

Many people are familiar with Irish dance from popular productions such as “Riverdance,” “Lord of the Dance” and “Feet of Flames.” While the origins of these “show” performances are traced to traditional Irish dance, “we do the social form of dancing,” Anna Sandlin said.

“Some dances would be special to a county,” said her husband Dave, who noted there are 38 registered dances in Ireland, some of them hundreds of years old. “The same dances would be handed down from generation to generation. It was the grandmother and grandfather who were responsible for handing them down.”

Many library patrons were surprised to learn that American square dancing also has its roots in Irish traditional dance. Waves of Irish immigrants in the 19th century brought to their new homes cultural traditions that included community dances. However, Dave Sandlin said, as new generations of American-born descendants of Irish immigrants matured, they had no village elders to pass down the steps of native dance.

“The American solution, being the ever-resourceful people we are, was the invention of the caller,” he said.

Dave Sandlin also explained the iconic pose of keeping one’s arms rigidly at one’s side while one’s feet flew at amazing speed to the music during Irish dance. It was, he said, simply a matter of not taking up too much room on a crowded dance floor.

“Sometimes the barn door would be taken down and people would dance on it,” Dave Sandlin said. “People had to stay in their own space. It was crowded!”

At last it was time for those in the audience to learn a bit of Irish dance themselves. Youngsters, high schoolers, college kids, and moms and dads surged to the front of the room, where members of the Christian Céilí Club guided them through the steps.

Steven Bozzay, a home-schooled 7-year-old, and his sister Sarah, 5, hadn’t really intended to get up and dance, he said. “Then I saw how much fun it was,” he said. Grasping Sarah carefully by the hand, soon the kids were whirling around the floor, as their proud mom Stacy Bozzay watched.

Youth librarian Heather Nitzel clapped along with the music and smiled with satisfaction. Crestview might just have a new batch of Riverdancers thanks to another successful Family Library Time program.