Riverdance lead Marty Dowds
The great Riverdance finale—dancers strung across the stage, shoulder to shoulder in a single line, each one ramrod straight, heels hammering into hardwood, the whole line moving as one. If you have ever danced, it’s hard to attend a performance of the high-stepping spectacle and not imagine yourself in that line, filling the concert hall with that great noise.
For just under a dozen local dancers—some of them schooled in the Irish traditional form, a few of them students of tap—the fantasy came a bit closer to reality in a small church hall on Sansom Street in Philadelphia on Saturday. Marty Dowds, lead dancer of the Riverdance Boyne touring company, led them in a demanding hour-long master class sponsored by the Tapography dance school.
Dowds, dressed in a white t-shirt and drawstring jazz pants, showed up a bit late. His cab had gotten held up in traffic. He needed a shave, and his hair hadn’t been combed. Any normal human being would take a while to come up to full speed.
Dowds was raring to go in the time it took to change from his street kicks to his big, clunky hard shoes. And in less time in that, Dowds was putting two short lines of young women through their paces.
There were a couple of brief water breaks, and then on they went. It all came together in the end, as Marty urged the two short lines into one long one. Tapography’s Dave Pershica cued up the music to that big closing number.
With Dowds out in front, the students got a chance to live the Riverdance dream—if only for a few short moments. Was it perfect? No, far from it. But judging by all the smiles, it was close enough.
