Lady of the Dance

by Duffy, Marie; Rowley, Eddie;

  Matt always had great foresight and a brilliant mind for creating choreography. I was given a high-profile role in this segment of the show because I was the dancer who demonstrated the new steps. This was no easy task as I had to do the moves in slow motion while maintaining my balance – all the while keeping a big smile on my face. Then a group of us would do the lessons and the dances.

  While Inis Ealga became the resident dancers on Club Céilí, Matt also opened it up to other dance classes from around the country. In that period I made some lifelong friends with dancers who appeared on the show, including Seamus and Aine O’Shea and Noreen Flanagan Duggan, who are well known in the Irish dancing world as they went on to become C.L.R.G. teachers and adjudicators and members of An Coimisiún, the governing body of Irish dance.

  The two TV shows ran over four years in total, so the exposure we got in Ireland was tremendous. They were Friday night shows and that was prime-time television, particularly as there was no competition from other stations at the time. To have a Friday night slot was huge.

  I couldn’t help but notice the recognition it gave me at the time due to the fact that I was a regular feature on every show, doing specialised performance pieces, or a solo dance, in front of the camera.

  As we were in one-channel-TV land at the time, there was no escaping me.

  What I really loved about doing those television shows is the fact that it made my mother so proud. There was her daughter Mar-ee on the telly, with all the neighbours on the street, or at least those who had televisions, watching her perform. So all Mum’s struggles to get me to do music and dancing in hard financial times had now paid off. I could see that she was really chuffed, even though I don’t imagine she ever expected me to be on television. But there I was: Mar-ee Duffy the TV dance star and Rolo ad celebrity.

  * * *

  I spent several years working on Telefís Éireann with Matt in the 1960s. Matt was the go-to person whenever they needed dancers for shows, so we organised them.

  Seamus Ennis, the celebrated Irish uileann piper, singer and Irish music collector, had worked for the BBC in London and when he returned to Ireland Telefís Éireann gave him a Saturday morning children’s programme. Matt was once again asked to provide the children for that show, and I worked on it with him.

  I loved the challenge of that show because it wasn’t straightforward children’s dancing. We also had to create different games for the young people to play on the TV. So we invented street games with footballs and ropes and things like that. We even gave hopscotch a new twist.

  I did that show every Saturday morning and looking back today I realise how great it was to be involved in the early days of Irish television. And, without being aware of it, I was learning new skills that would benefit me, and the people I worked with, in my later career.

  With his flair for creating new styles of choreography, Matt took Inis Ealga into the hotels where we started doing exhibitions at their cabaret shows. This was in the early stages of Irish dancing being tweaked to become show dancing.

  When two Irish showbiz personalities, Eamon Andrews and Fred O’Donovan, launched Jury’s Cabaret, they hired us as the dancers. Irish comedian Hal Roache was the star of that show, which became a major attraction for Irish-American tourists and ran for several decades. In fact, it went into the Guinness Book of Records as the longest running cabaret show in Ireland.

  * * *

  My mother went back to America, where she was living with Aunt Em in Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York, thinking that I would follow her out. She was really keen on me making the break from Inis Ealga because she felt it would be for my own good. Although I was now working at a very high level, it was relentless. There was no sign of me settling down with a man – trying to hang on to one was like catching a wet bar of soap – and I think she felt it was something I would come to regret later in life. She could see time running out for me. But I couldn’t make the break at the time.

  ‘Well, if you’re not coming out I’m going home,’ Mum told me in an exasperated tone on the phone one day.

  And so she did. Back to our house on Cashel Road.

  The next time Mother returned to New York it was to look after Aunt Em, as her health was then deteriorating. She was hospitalised and suffering from very bad emphysema. Mum went over to spend time with her, and to ensure that she had all the support she needed in her final days on earth. She stayed with my cousin, Tom, and his wife, Arline, and would go to the hospital a couple of times a day.

  I was very upset when Aunt Em passed away in July 1971. Even though it was a happy release for her, as emphysema is a terrible lung disease, it was still heartbreaking to be told that she was gone.

  Aunt Em had been quite a character. Even to this day, whenever we get together as a family the stories about that remarkable woman are always a great source of amusement.

  I remember that one time she came home on a visit after her first year in America and we all noticed that she looked years younger.

  ‘Where have all her wrinkles gone?’ my brother Brian laughed.

  We couldn’t stop staring at her.

  All the wrinkles she left Ireland with had disappeared. They hadn’t invented Botox in those days, but whatever potion she found over there had certainly worked. There wasn’t a crease to be seen on her face.

  Aunt Em’s terrible driving skills and her motoring escapades have also provided us with endless amusement. A famous story told about her in the family is the day she drove out to the countryside to visit one of my uncle Martin’s daughters. Aunt Em, of course, was notorious for torturing the gearboxes of cars. As she set off for home after her country visit that day the only gear she could engage was reverse. And so she drove all the way back to the city … in reverse!

  As many people found to their cost, Aunt Em was not a woman to be messed with. My cousin, Tom, has a vivid memory of his mother confronting a sadistic teacher who had sent him home one afternoon with swollen hands after a particularly vicious caning in school when he was just seven years old.

  The next morning Aunt Em accompanied Tom to the school. After all the young pupils had settled in to their classroom, she knocked on the door of Tom’s teacher, smiled in his direction, and with a curled finger she invited him to join her in the hallway.

  When the six-foot-two tall teacher stepped out of the classroom Aunt Em then produced a handgun and told the terrified monster that if he ever sent her son home in that condition again both she and the gun would return … and this time she would shoot him with no questions asked.

  At that moment the school principal arrived on the scene and interrupted her little ‘discussion’. The principal immediately invited her to step into his office – at which point Tom’s teacher took off up the hall like a scalded cat.

  The principal said he had a good mind to call the guards and have her arrested for threatening the teacher with a gun.

  Aunt Em told him to ‘go right ahead’!

  But there the matter ended.

  The principal, it transpired, was an Old IRA member who had fought alongside her in the War of Independence. However, he did seek a promise from Aunt Em that she would never again bring a gun on to the school premises. And I doubt that it was ever called for again.

  I had grown very close to Aunt Em during my early years and I really yearned to say goodbye to her when she died. So it was lovely that my cousin Tom took his mother’s remains home to Ireland to be buried with her family, the O’Kellys, in Glasnevin Cemetery. It allowed us all to pay our final respects and to give her a good Irish send-off.

  Aunt Em went out with a bang – literally. Having been an active soldier of Ireland, she was buried with full military honours, including the tapping of drums and a volley of shots fired over her graveside.

  Tom went on to enjoy a very good life in America, fulfilling his mother’s dream. It was there that he met his Irish-American wife, Arline, and the couple, who now live in North Carolina, started a family tog
ether and reared three fine sons, Thomas, Dennis and Frederick (Fritz).

  When he first moved to America, Tom trained as a bartender and ran Hurley’s bar and restaurant on the corner of New York’s Radio City venue for many years. It was a very famous bar around theatre-land and lots of stars frequented it through the decades.

  When I started doing Irish dancing workshops in America during the 1970s, I always made a point of dropping in to Hurley’s to catch up with Tom and to reminisce about old times while also bringing him up to date on happenings in our family.

  * * *

  Come 1969 there was a war of sorts going on in the world of Irish dancing, with Matt in the middle of it.

  The dance teachers set up their own organisation, known as An Comhdháil (The Congress of Irish Dance Teachers). Then they had a falling out with the governing body, An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha, or C.L.R.G. as it’s known.

  Some of the big schools in Dublin split with An Coimisiún at this point. And to build up the Coimisiún again, Matt and a number of other individuals came up with the idea of launching the Irish Dancing World Championships.

  Their grand ambition of putting Irish dancing on the world stage was ridiculed at the time. Their critics scoffed at the idea, declaring that it was ludicrous to expect people to travel from places likes America and Australia.

  ‘You’re off your head,’ they told him.

  But, undaunted, Matt persevered and established the structure, which was like a pyramid. The bottom rung was the regional championships, and then you had the national championships and finally the world championships at the top.

  Needless to say, I was sucked into more work. I became Matt’s personal assistant for the running of this world event.

  We started organising it from Matt’s home, where all the entries would come in and I’d do the secretarial work. Cups and trophies had to be organised, and I recall one time Matt insisting that everyone who qualified should get some kind of recognition, so we had to go looking for sponsorship.

  Fergal Quinn, one of Ireland’s great entrepreneurs and the founder of Superquinn, was a good friend of Matt and he was very generous to us at that time.

  And from humble beginnings in the tiny theatre of Coláiste Mhuire in Dublin’s Parnell Square in 1969, the championships have grown into a huge international event.

  The first World Championships were held over a weekend in Coláiste Mhuire; now it’s an eight-day event, starting on the Sunday before Easter, and is worth over £10 million to the local economy of any city that hosts it, so it is well sought after worldwide. I’m still an active member of the committee for this event.

  * * *

  Not only were the World Championships a great success for Irish dancing, they also introduced me to my first serious boyfriend.

  Like every fairy-tale love story, our eyes met across a crowded room. The room in Coláiste Mhuire was crowded because it was the World Championships, but somehow I had picked out this handsome young man. There was a friendly nod and we casually got chatting, with the conversation rolling easily as the common topic was Irish dancing. I remember being taken with his lovely accent. John, I’ll call him, was from London.

  It’s fair to say I was smitten fairly quickly, and the attraction was mutual. Amid all the organised chaos around us we talked like we’d known each other all our lives. Finally, we arranged to meet up when the day’s schedule was over.

  John had a genial personality and was a gentleman in the way he conducted himself. We spent a lovely time together and after the championships we kept in touch and continued to build on our relationship. The following year we attended the wedding of two dance teachers in Glasgow as a couple, and during that romantic occasion he proposed to me.

  That summer John came over on holiday and he could see how busy my life was with Inis Ealga. We did get to spend time together and even went looking for rings, but we never made a decision on one. I don’t know if that was a sign that maybe we were having second thoughts about how our lives would work together.

  When John returned to Scotland after that holiday the relationship slowly fizzled out. It was an amicable parting and we kept in touch over the years. But for years afterwards, while I was still on my own, I would often wonder if John had cooled on the relationship because my life had been so absorbed with Inis Ealga. And if I hadn’t been so caught up in my work there, would I have been more open to a life with him? Would we have married, set up home together and reared children?

  It’s not a conversation I ever had with him.

  Whatever the reason, it was a love story without the fairy-tale ending.

  Inis Ealga Goes Global

  I had no idea that Irish dancing would open doors that would lead me to an international career of sorts.

  Pop and rock stars were jet-setting around the globe in those heady days of the sixties and seventies, criss-crossing the Atlantic and flying to exotic locations. It never crossed my mind that teaching Irish dancing would also be my ticket to world travel. Inis Ealga gave me that opportunity.

  The World Championships put Inis Ealga on the map, particularly after we had a winner in every championship. After that our name and reputation spread like a gorse fire during a long, hot summer.

  Then came a shower of requests for us to do workshops with schools in North America where an Irish dancing scene had been established by people like Peter Smith, May Butler, Cyril McEniff, Fidelma Davis and Anne O’Sullivan.

  I can still remember the excitement of getting on a plane to Canada after our first invitation from May and Paddy Butler of the famous Butler Academy in Toronto. May, a lovely, warm, graceful lady, was a native of Dalkey in south county Dublin, and she was running a very successful school in Toronto at the time.

  We had become great friends with the Butlers because we’d meet them when they came home on holiday to Dublin every year with their young children, June and Patrick.

  At this point Inis Ealga had become quite famous for our figure choreography and dance drama. Our solo dancers were doing well in every age group. I had trained each dancer to the same standard, fulfilling a pledge I had made to myself when I’d struggled with my confidence the last time I’d danced competitively in the All-Ireland Championships.

  Paddy Butler was impressed by our dancers and he made the approach to Matt at the championships.

  ‘What would it take to get you guys out to Toronto?’ Paddy asked. ‘Would you come out and teach us that dance?’

  So off we went, Matt and myself, for a month of teaching. The air trip was an adventure in itself. Firstly, we had to make our way to Scotland as the chartered flight to Toronto was from Prestwick. The glamour of jet-setting was stripped away shortly after we took off. The plane was packed to capacity, people were smoking all around me, and they ran out of food shortly after the in-flight service had started.

  My childlike excitement quickly abated.

  This felt like a trip from hell.

  By the time we landed in Toronto, I felt like we’d gone around the world in eighty days. I was so glad to be stepping off that plane, but my excitement levels were soon back up when Paddy and May arrived to whisk us off to our base in the city. They were the perfect hosts: warm, welcoming and full of fun.

  Our assignment in Toronto was like a secret service mission, an undercover job. May and Paddy didn’t want other local teachers to know that we had been hired in as specialists to teach a particular dance.

  I had developed my own methods of specific training, with warm-up exercises and drilling that had never been done before. This was a novelty for the dancers at the Butler school and they embraced it all. I couldn’t have asked for more enthusiastic students. They willingly opened up to my tuition and absorbed my dancing tips. Many of them would go on to make their mark winning major titles.

  I am proud to say that from my very first workshop, and the others that followed over the following couple of years, some very successful teachers, including Rosie Fearon and Yvonne
Kelly, to name but two, emerged. They became world-class teachers who produced world champions themselves.

  At the end of that month, during which Paddy and May took us to see the sights and were very generous with their hospitality, it was time to step on to another flight from hell. This time the return journey across the Atlantic was worse because I knew what lay ahead. To add to the endurance test there were a lot of drunk people around me, and everyone was annoyed when the food ran out (again!).

  My jet-setting life failed miserably to live up to my expectations. I’m sure it was all so different for Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney at the time.

  We left Toronto with our secret mission still under wraps. Nobody twigged that the Butler school had drafted in some outside expertise.

  A few months later, May and Paddy took one of their students to dance in New York. Two friends of mine, Peter Smith and Cyril McNiffe, were at the competition and standing at the shoulders of May and Paddy as their dancer went through her routine.

  ‘That dance looks very familiar,’ Peter remarked mischievously.

  ‘It looks very familiar to me too,’ Cyril agreed.

  ‘Indeed, it’s very similar to something I’ve seen in Ireland,’ Peter added with a knowing look.

  May and Paddy refused to take the bait.

  They admitted to nothing.

  * * *

  Inis Ealga dancers swept the boards at the World Championships every year over the next couple of decades, and my jet-setting career continued to flourish. I’m joking, of course, about the jet-setting. But every summer I would fly out to America to run workshops, give masterclasses and adjudicate at competitions. I worked long hours every day, but I earned really good money. This was lucrative work for something I loved doing, and now it was on an international scale.

  While in America during those summers, I would think back on the conversations I had with my mother years earlier when she told me about the opportunities that were available to me in that part of the world. I realised that she was so right. With the contacts I had established through Irish dancing, I knew I could pick up a job at the drop of a hat in the US. And the more I became familiar with the States, the more I felt I could live there. Then work would take over and the moment would pass.