It’s the last dance. After all those years of foot-stomping, heel-tapping, stiff-backed, step-dance prancing, the Riverdance folk are hanging up their shoes. Truth is, it’s only the North American market that will see a hiatus of the popular show.
Ní Charra ended up touring as a fiddler with Riverdance for eight years, leaving the show six years ago to pursue her own music career. Last year, as the producers started putting together the lineup for the show’s grand finale tour, they asked Ní Charra to come back on the road for, as she put it, a final ‘hurrah!’
Good dancing makes you want to dance, and Riverdance does that. Not only is this incoming production a chance to see, one last time, one of the defining touring shows of the past 20 years, it’s a chance to pay tribute to a show that, I’m sure, swells the ranks of local dance classes, where young girls and boys turn step dancing from something you simply see into something you do.
It goes without saying Chicago lived up to it’s name. I was determined to fit in as much as possible for the week and went in all guns blazing. I was that annoying tourist that we all see walking down the street in our home towns! The very fact we were in a heatwave, overlapped with visits from friends and loved ones and with St. Patrick’s Day flung into the mix, the week was certainly going to prove eventful!
This week Maeve Fearon is in Chicago. There are more sites to be seen, a hen party, a visit from Dance Director Breandan De Gallai and a lot of green for St Patrick’s Day.
As a dancer, you tend to concentrate so much on your own performance that you forget the effort it takes from our crew members to set up the show. For such a small group they are faced with the mammoth task of building the stage, lights, sound and costume department on a daily basis. This week, I spoke to a few of them to try and find out a bit more about their job responsibilities and daily routine.
Local audiences will have a chance to experience The Riverdance Farewell Tour, coming April 4 and 5 to the Performing Arts Center at Kent State University Tuscarawas.
Perfectly timed for St. Patrick’s Day, “Riverdance,” the spectacular display of Irish folk dance, speckled with the arts of a few other ethnicities in its mix, returns for what’s billed as its farewell visit, on view through Sunday at the Oriental Theatre.
Read about Fiona McCabes list of 11 cities visited, competitions won and more from behind the curtain.
In this weeks tour blog, Irish Dance Troupe member Maeve Fearon gives us a unique look backstage at a Riverdance show. Also she tells us how the company have covered approximately 5,392 miles and stayed in 22 different hotel rooms since the beginning of the tour!