#irish dancer

Lola Montez

Artist: Attributed to Joseph Karl Stieler (German, 1781–1858)

Date: c. 1845

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia

Description

Performed by: Hannah Redlich

Number: “Guns and Ships”

Choreographer: Hannah Redlich

Style: Irish Dance

FOR A YOUNG DANCER ON ST. PATRICK’S DAY

At six, her stance is Like a professional’s—she waits her cue Intensely and with no expression, The youngest in the troupe of girls Costumed alike in skirts that flare like bells Embroidered with designs— Abstracted tangled animals and geometric vines— Drawn from the Book of Kells, Hair done up in headdresses of artificial curls To bounce in time to lively Irish dances, But it’s the music of a Shaker hymn When she takes her place Alone on the plywood stage, candescent with such fierce And concentrated joy As no smile will pierce And no trivial laughter can alloy, Each swift and nimble limb Inhabiting its quickness without haste, As if she had only herself to please. All gazes Fix on her, not because, Or not only because, she is a lovely, solemn elf, Not that her eyes Are just the shade of blue Patterned on antique Delft Or that cliché of cloudless skies (Though bored through with the blackness of unfathomable Space), And it is not her fearsome self-possession Around her, tightly furled, Rather the possession of her self By a vaster power Whose presence in this low room till this hour Had been unknown to us And momently amazes, As the wide wind that breathes upon the world Enlists the tossing of high-masted trees, The bowing of the grass, The shiver of a roadside flower, So we may see it pass.