The day after Thanksgiving 2015, we spent the afternoon at Rebecca's grandmother’s house, a rambling, historic Victorian that had been their family home since 1956. We were talking about the ephemeral nature of dance, the difficulty in capturing it, and our desire to DO something, to create or record something that could last. Eventually, we looked at each other and said, "Ok, if we're really serious, let's make something right now." We were unprepared, weren't dressed for the occasion, and only had an iPhone camera and a CD player, but we found a spot outside where we liked the sound of our shoes on the slate pathway, turned on the camera, and made a video. After some very amateur editing, we had a modest creation, far from what we were trying to do, but still with some redeeming aesthetic and sound qualities. Almost three years later, after a lot of creating, learning, and trial and error, we found ourselves back at that house, this time with a team of collaborators, filming this first-of-its-kind "visual album."

This work comes from a desire to create something that documents our dancing and our lives at a specific point in time. In the way a musician has the outlet of creating an album, we felt it should be possible to create a "visual album" – a collection of dances caught on film that are connected by being of the same moment in our creative process, rooted in a physical space that means something to us, and representing the style and repertoire that we practice.

On the surface, this is just traditional dancing and music, something we believe does not need to be dressed up or altered to be beautiful and meaningful. We find the beauty in these things in their small dimensions. For the traditional material, we put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the steps as they fit with the tunes, the flow from one step to the next, the balance between the steps and the music, and the spatial relationships between our feet, our bodies, and the music. For our original material, we labored over small choices in the composition of the steps, paying attention to pickup notes in the rhythms, emphasizing certain beats of the tune, and using the physical shape of the movements to build phrasing. These are small details, as they should be, and are perhaps unnoticeable by an outside observer. But we hope that the overall effect is one of cohesion and musicality.

A large part of the inspiration for creating these vignettes was to try to bring the viewer into that small space. In so much of traditional dance – whether step dancing, sean-nós dance, or set dancing – endless intricate, subtle, and incredibly beautiful movements are happening from the knees and ankles down. It's hard to translate this onto a stage. We wanted to use close-up shots to change the scale of what you usually look at when watching a percussive dancer.

This was a much larger undertaking than we imagined. Filming this many pieces, finding a location, trying to find the right balance between sound quality and the aesthetics of the space; there were so many considerations and we’re sure we've made more mistakes than gotten things right. But in the spirit of just DOING something, we're releasing this and sharing it with our community in the hope that this creation will capture what we're doing now, maybe inspire others to create something, and add to an understanding of what traditional dancing is or could be, in one context.  

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With Thanks To….

We couldn’t have done this without our incredible collaborators. Thanks to Chris for being right there with us in listening to the detail between dance rhythms and tunes; Nathan for his thoughtful ear and willingness to try out so many ideas; Louise for her amazing eye for detail and artistry; Ethan for his calm and capable support during filming; Katie for keeping the recording days moving smoothly; and Matthew for keeping us going all the way through.

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Thanks also to....

Danny Noveck, Joey Abarta, Hannah & Bill DeRusha, Richard McGowan, Peg Wright, Winky, Amy, Margot, Pooky, Kevin Doyle, Kieran Jordan, Michael Tubridy, Patrick O'Dea, Bill Winn, Will Woodson, Laura Keeler, Samantha Jones, Adrienne Jacobson, Mairin Ui Chiedi