Research by DkIT’s Dr Daithí Kearney published in Irish University Review
Dr Daithí Kearney, co-Director of the Creative Arts Research Centre at Dundalk Institute of Technology, has published an article on Irish dance and embodied memory in Irish University Review. It forms part of a special issue edited by Dr Emily Mark-Fitzgerald and Dr Emma Radley of UCD that brings new work and perspectives that go ‘beyond the text’, making innovative use of non-textual sources and/or methodologies, and disseminating research on various cultural practices (visual, material, aural, emotional/sensory, embodied, multi-medial, etc.) which themselves disrupt assumptions about the nation and epistemologies of ‘Irishness’.
Daithí’s article, ‘Watch the Feet: Understanding Irish Dance Traditions as an Embodied Archive’, examines Irish traditional step dance as an embodied cultural expression that has reached a global audience as a commodified artform. Focusing on steps from the Munnix tradition of North Kerry, the article highlights differences in performance aesthetics that incorporate various levels of cultural understanding or a kinaesthetic sense of place referring to how the movement of the dancing body reflects the milieu and cultural experiences of the dancer. The dissemination of the Munnix tradition and steps internationally has led to reinterpretation by various dancers, and Daithí draws on his own experience as a dancer to critically engage with dance as means of understanding Irish culture.
The Irish University Review is the premier and leading journal in Irish literary criticism. It covers, on a global scale, all aspects of Irish literature in the English language. Other articles in this volume focus on photography, art, radio, transmedia, theatre, music and cloud computing including subjects from the currach in Irish feminist and ecocritical art practice to The Pogues’ expression of Irishness, and from William Butler Yeats's early and sustained engagement with wireless communication to the Venice Biennale of Architecture.
It has been a busy few months for Kearney. A poet, his work has also featured in several journals in the past two months including Drawn to the Light, Prosetrics, Remington Review and Wells Street Journal. His humorous stage production ‘St Oliver Plans a Party’ was performed for the reopening of Louth Village Community Hub by members of Drogheda Comhaltas, and his musical setting of the Prayer to Saint Oliver Plunkett, which forms part of the 400th anniversary celebrations in the Diocese this year, was performed by the choir of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Louth Village.
His most recent publication can be accessed through the journal’s website.
