DANCE

Riverdance revolution: More than two decades later, world still captivated by Irish dance sensation

Photo from Riverdance — The 20th Anniversary World Tour
Photo from Riverdance — The 20th Anniversary World Tour

Bobby Hodges was 6 years old and watching the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest with his brother in their hometown of Bristol, England.

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The Riverdance troupe executes the title number.

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“Anna Livia” is the first new number added to Riverdance in nearly 14 years. An a cappella number for the female members of the troupe, it takes its name and inspiration from Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce.

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The 20th anniversary tour includes the long-standing numbers “Slip Into Spring and “The Countess Cathleen”

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The 20th anniversary tour includes the long-standing numbers “Slip Into Spring – The Harvest”

The show included a seven-minute interval act that blended Irish music and dance called "Riverdance," produced for television by Moya Doherty with music by Bill Whelan. Hodges was transfixed. Right afterward, the Hodges boys signed up for dance classes.

Riverdance — The 20th Anniversary World Tour

7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday, Robinson Center Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St., Little Rock.

Presenter: Celebrity Attractions

Tickets: $23-$72

(501) 244-8800

ticketmaster.com; CelebrityAttraction…

Doherty, Whelan and director John McColgan extended that seven-minute piece into a full-length stage show, a fusion of Irish and International music and dance, in 1995. Following its record-breaking world-premiere run in Dublin, it transferred to London; a world tour started in New York in March 1996, with companies traveling across North America, Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America and Oceania.

And it has created a sort of Irish-dance cottage industry that has inspired hundreds of thousands of youngsters to enter Irish dance schools and spawned subsequent major shows, including Lord of the Dance.

Hodges, meanwhile, has worked his way up the Irish dance ladder and is now one of three lead male dancers for Riverdance -- The 20th Anniversary World Tour, with five performances Friday-Sunday at Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall.

Hodges, his colleagues and a trio of female leads lead the numbers and dance various solos. As such, they get a lot more footwork than the rest of the troupe.

"We get a few extra steps," he says.

He has been with Riverdance for three years, most of it traveling.

"Every summer we sit down in Dublin for three months," he says. "That's usually the only real long sit-down we do. The rest of the last three years have been on the road."

He only gets back to Bristol for short stays: "Last year I spent only 22 days [there] over the whole year, but that's the price. We're fortunate enough that there is such a demand for what we're doing right now.

"So it's good that people are still so enthusiastic about Riverdance, which means that we have a job and a stable career out of it, which, 20 years ago when it started, there was no such a thing as a career in Irish dance."

The show has sparked that huge boom in schools of Irish dance, not just in the United States but in other parts of the world, which has meant an influx of dancers from lots of places you might not expect, Hodges says.

"There are people in this show from Australia and from the furthest western part of Canada," he explains.

"Even me, I know I'm only from England, just across the 'river' from Dublin, shall we say, but I don't have any Irish family, and I started because of Riverdance. The show has reached so many places and it has really spawned interest in Irish dance around the world."

Strict standards

No matter where the show goes, Hodges says, the creative minds remain very particular to maintain its strict standards. Director John McColgan, for example, regularly stresses that "Every night is opening night," Hodges adds, "referring to all the people who have never seen Riverdance. The entire team, from crew, to band, to cast, to 'creatives,' ensure that the show is as good as it was in 1995 when it debuted."

Of course, there have been some changes since then.

"For people who have seen the show before, some of the choreography and costumes have been updated," Hodges says.

And for this tour, the creators have put together an entire new number, the first in nearly 14 years. "Anna Livia" is an a cappella number for the female Irish dancers with rhythms and additional text by Whelan and choreography by John Carey. It opens with a verse from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake that Whelan has set to music; the name derives from and the number pays tribute to Joyce's literary personification of Dublin's River Liffey.

Moreover, Hodges says, "The company always ensures that there's new and fresh talent coming through, so there are a few new leads, and new cast members that have come through the Riverdance Summer School, which is a training program and audition tool for the show. There's constantly new folks coming in to help keep us veterans on our toes." More than 500 Irish dancers from 15 countries have passed through the school since it started in 2015.

Working his way up

Hodges, after winning 10 world titles as a competitive Irish dancer, joined the cast of Lord of the Dance and within six weeks he was cast as the principal lead. In 2012 he joined a troupe called Prodijig to help create their debut show, Footstorm, then went on to be principal lead in another Irish-dance-inspired show, Heartbeat of Home.

Prodijig, Hodges explains, toured the United Kingdom and Ireland, but never made it to the United States, while Heartbeat of Home ("very modern, and there's a lot of crossover with other's dance styles") played in only three U.S. cities: Chicago, Detroit and Boston. So you can be forgiven if you haven't heard of them.

He says Riverdance "is the original Irish dance show, so a lot of steps ... are pure Irish dance in their most rural form .... Especially the first number, 'Reel Around the Sun.' Which is, surprisingly, quite hard to execute. We have to try and make it look easy, but some of the steps in it are some of the original Irish dance moves."

Other numbers in the show include "Slip Into Spring -- The Harvest," "The Countess Cathleen," and "Firedance," plus the title number and the all-out finale.

In two decades, more than 25 million people in more than 515 venues in 47 countries across six continents have seen at least one of the more than 11,500 performances.

The current tour started in January and ends June 20, and because it's a 20th anniversary celebration, "we're covering a lot of space and getting to a lot of the different states," Hodges says. Many of those states may never have had the show come through.

"So I'm looking forward to getting to certain states I haven't been before," he says. "I ought to start keeping track."

Style on 04/11/2017

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