What’s the Deal with the Arms?

I was recently teaching a workshop and one of my students asked me one of my favorite questions, but one that surprisingly, rarely gets asked: “Why do Irish dancers keep their arms down?”. For me, as someone raised within the world of competitive Irish dancing, I had heard a few stories to explain this weird phenomenon, but they always seemed a bit far-fetched for me. 

The first story, I feel, is a classic. Supposedly during the occupation of Ireland by the English, folks were banned from dancing in their houses and as a way to not draw attention to any soldier passing by and looking in through the window or the upper half of a half-door, people kept their arms down so the soldiers wouldn’t know they were dancing. This is rather comical when you consider that just about every form of Irish dance involves some kind of hopping or bouncing so it would have been rather obvious that these people were dancing, even if they did keep their arms down. 

The other story frequently fed to us was from the perspective of the Catholic church forcing a level of decorum on the people of Ireland. In other words, it would have been deemed improper to use your arms while dancing. While less far-fetched, this story isn’t entirely true, though the Catholic Church did negatively affect Irish dancing after Irish independence. 
Neither of these made a lot of sense to me, mainly because despite being raised in the United States, I was at least somewhat aware of the long fight for independence that Ireland finally achieved at the start of the 20th century and was always confused by why would the Irish people would continue with practices enforced by their oppressors. So then, I did some research. 

The late Joe O’Donovan from Co. Cork was a beacon for sharing some important information about traditional dancing from the period before and after Ireland’s independence. He stated that while it was good to keep the arms by your sides, it was significantly less rigid than is seen in competitions today. Instead, the arms could maintain a gentle bend, though with minimal swinging. He described tools used by dance teachers to help their pupils with this: two small wooden dowels with stones tied to them. The student would hold the dowel in each of their hands with the stone dangling down and would use the weight of the stones to help keep their arms down. Considering the weight of these stones would have been light enough to still dance with, I hope it helps describe the more minimal approach to keeping the arms down.

When I continued asking this question to my peers and mentors, a consistent and rather practical response kept coming up: the emphasis has always been on the lower half of the body and the arms have just not been a part of the equation either in an effort to keep the emphasis on the lower half of the body or because, in the case of sean-nós dancing, there just aren’t any rules and therefore anything goes. There is also the fact that by isolating half of your body, you are making an already complicated dance form significantly more difficult to perform and it has therefore become part of the prowess of being an Irish dancer.

But I’m still drawn back to the fact that even today, stories of colonisation are at the heart of the myths around this element of Irish dance. Considering that the extremity of the arms has only become greater over time, is it too far to consider that Ireland and Irish dance is colonising itself? Take for instance the stories told to me - The “English soldiers” can be likened to the 1935 dance halls act, which was enforced by an Irish government and the Catholic Church, is a very real law that meant people could no longer dance inside their homes. This law created one of the greatest cultural shifts in traditional dance and music in Ireland, affecting the community’s relationship with dancing which has led to the now massive gap between traditional dance and music; women in traditional music; and the unfortunate popularisation of the bodhrán (only kidding).

What do you think? Have you heard any crazy stories about why Irish dancers keep their arms down? What do you say to the idea of self-colonisation through traditional arts?