Matt and Shannon Heaton: in Lambertville on Saturday.

A heads up to our Bucks County brethren—a new session went on the calendar this week. There will be a session on Tuesday night’s at the King George II Inn, right on the waterfront in Bristol Borough starting this week. If you have the music in you, let it out.

Slainte has the music in them. Frank Daly and C.J. Mills will be performing on Saturday at Paddy Whacks on the Boulevard (that’s Roosevelt Boulevard to you) in Philly on Saturday afternoon.

In Lambertville, NJ, two of our faves—Matt and Shannon Heaton—will be at The Birdhouse Center for the Arts on Main Street.

On Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the Villanova Irish Dance Team hosts an Intercollegiate Irish Dance Festival at the Jake Nevins Fieldhouse. Eight teams—plus the team from ‘Nova—will take part. There’s a Grand Irish Show at 7:30, featuring RUNA, and performances from all the collegiate teams.

For our Delaware peeps, there’s a ceili at the Irish Center in Wilmington on Sunday.

We’ve been hearing good things about the Tuesday session at Maloney’s in Ardmore—members of Blackthorn showing up, the place getting packed, and fun being had.

On Thursday, the Irish American Business Chamber and Network welcomes Udraras na Gaeltachta, the regional authority responsible for the economic, cultural and social development of the Gaeltacht, the parts of Ireland where Irish is still spoken. Udaras encourages investment in the Gaeltacht through many generous incentives for new businesses—so if you have a business that could support an international office or plant, come to the conference at The Hyatt at the Bellevue on Broad Street in Philadelphia. It starts at 8 AM and runs through 2 PM, with lunch.

At 5:30 PM, head to St. Declan’s Well Pub on Walnut Street to mix and mingle with representatives from Udaras na Gaeltachta and members of the Irish-American community with some special whiskey tasting and Guinness pint glass engraving.

If you were one of the many people who helped County Tyrone musician Raymond Coleman when all of his gear was stolen from his van a few weeks ago, he’s saying thank you at The Plough and the Stars with a free concert featuring himself, his brother singer-songwriter Mickey Coleman and some surprise guests on Thursday starting at 7:30 PM.

Please check our calendar for more information and for late-breaking events

Colin Dunne wasn’t exactly born step dancing, but it was close. The man who is known as “a leading figure” in Irish dance, who choreographed part of “Riverdance” and took over the lead role from Michael Flately when he left the iconic musical in 1995, first started going to Irish dance classes as a babe in arms.

“My two sisters had started to go to dance classes when I was six months old and I got to a certain age, my mother threw me in with them,” recalls Dunne, who is soft spoken, brown-eyed, and darkly handsome. “I never remember not liking it. In fact, I remember standing at the door of the house, my shoes in a bag, shouting, ‘We’re going to be late!’”

That was in Birmingham, England, where he was born to Irish parents.  Once in the world of Irish dance, Dunne took it by storm. He won his first World Championship title by the age of nine and was the first dancer ever to win the World, All England, and all Ireland titles in the same year. When he finally retired from competition at 22, he had won a total of nine World, 11 Great Britain, and eight All Ireland titles.

He is more than humble about his trove of trophies. “I now question any activity in whereby a nine-year-old can become a world champion,” he says thoughtfully. “I learned a valuable lesson at the age of 10—you can go back the next year and you don’t win. I’m not sure about the psychology of kids being at something at a world champion level.”

But the stress never dimmed the passion. Although his love affair with dance has had its “ups and downs,” at 45, he’s still at it, still passionate. Dunne is bringing his multi-media homage to dance, “Out of Time,” to the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street, On September 19, 20, and 21, as part of the 2013 Philadelphia FringeArts Festival.

The one-man show, using archival footage from the ‘30s, ‘50s, and ‘70s, uncovers the pure simplicity of Irish dancing which, in those other times, was done noncompetitively by ordinary people whenever a fiddle, concertina, or whistle started to play. Much of the recorded music is provided by Clare fiddler Martin Hayes and longtime partner, Dennis Cahill of Chicago. Fionan de Barra, of the award-winning Philadelphia musical group, RUNA, designed the sound. Sineade Rushe is the director.

In pure Irish tradition, Dunne has also woven storytelling into the mix—much of it, his story, though he hesitates to call the show autobiographical. “It’s not biography explicitly. It’s not a history lesson. But I show these films, most of them from the RTE archives but a couple of pieces from my own personal collection (including footage of me dancing when I was 10), that show the element of time and how dancing was very different back in the 30s, 50s, and 70s than now, that it’s constantly evolving.”

The rigid stance, for instance. The films show that Irish dance wasn’t always just from the waist down, for example, challenging the prevailing wisdom on what is—and what isn’t—traditional. This was a turning point for Dunne, who spent time learning contemporary dance at the University of Limerick in part to escape from the “mold for a type of Irish dance” created by “Riverdance.”

“When I was in New York with ‘Riverdance’ I saw a lot of contemporary dance and theater and saw all kinds of work that wasn’t as big or brash as ‘Riverdance’ and a lot of solo shows that made me want to perform that way,” says Dunne. He also saw the idea of “tradition” as so much baggage that put the brakes on creativity, a concept he explores in “Out of Time.”

Colin Dunne

In fact, Dunne left the successful “Riverdance” after three years to explore this other version of the art form to keep his own passion for dance alive. “I had done 900 shows and I couldn’t do another one, I felt like I was losing my relationship with dance. Doing the same thing seven days a week can kill a part of you, which is why I needed to move into new territory.”

Not that he’s dissing “Riverdance.” In some ways, it kept him from a fate worse than death–accounting. After he “retired” from dancing at 22, he graduated from Warwick University in England with a bachelor’s degree in economics and worked as a trainee accountant at the Birmingham offices of Arthur Andersen, formerly one of the “big five” accounting firms in the world.

“Before ‘Riverdance’ there was no such thing as a career in Irish dance,” says Dunne. “You’d retire from competition and teach.”

But within a couple of days of passing his final exam that would have made him a full-fledged accountant, he got a call from Paddy Maloney, founder of the Irish group, The Chieftains, who invited him to peform on tour with the group in Canada. “I went in to my boss and asked if I could take some time off and they said, maybe you’d better resign, so I did,” Dunne recalls. “So in 1993 I went on tour for a month and told myself I was just going to take six months and do a couple of other tours before I decided what to do. So I went out with Frankie Gavin and DeDannan and figured I get this dance thing out of my system. Then, ‘Riverdance’ happened and everything changed.”

Dunne doesn’t intend to be “dancing in my 50s”—in fact, he’s moved more into choreography, something he’ll be doing at the Abbey Theater this year for a play about the 1913 Dublin lockout, which led to the rise of trade unions and, ultimately, the independence of Ireland from Great Britain.

One thing he will not be doing is revisiting accounting. “Um, no, even if. . .no,” he says with a bitter laugh. “I was a terrible accountant. I didn’t enjoy it.”

Liam Ó Maonlaí
Photo: Denise Foley

The very essence of a house concert is the intimacy between performer and audience; when that performer is Liam Ó Maonlaí, the experience is like a heady whirlwind romance.

Thanks to Gabriel Donohue and Marian Makins, who are the architects and hosts behind the Barn Star concert series, and a mutual friend who set up the concert, this past Wednesday night brought Liam Ó Maonlaí and fellow Hothouse Flowers band mate Peter O’Toole to Philadelphia for a spectacular evening of music. To be among a limited crowd of 50, seated in a living room around a beautiful baby grand piano, listening to these two brilliant musicians play for three hours, is a singularly memorable event.

The concert is one of only a few that Ó Maonlaí is performing this trip. His focus has been the Dakota Nation Unity Ride, an event that began in July and is bringing Native Americans from as far away as Canada on horseback and in canoes to New York for an observance of peace and healing. The gathering continues throughout this weekend, and information can be found here, at the website of the Unity Ride.

For Ó Maonlaí, who is so passionate about Irish heritage, and culture, and the preservation of the Irish language, listening to his stories is as much a part of the experience as hearing the music. Before singing an original, as gaeilge version of “Carrickfergus,” he spoke of  his own awakening to music through a tape of Seán Ó Riada’s: “The language and the land and the music and the people and the work–it all dances in front of you…Seán Ó Riada realized that it’s the roots. The roots go on. And they go down and then you go forward…So that’s what we had at home. That was my introduction to a band and an audience, on this little tape. The rest of the stuff, it just seeped in through osmosis. When I was about 10, I started to play the whistle and these tunes were already in me, so they just came out through the holes.”

For which we, who were in attendance Wednesday night, are eternally grateful. Here is where you can see Liam Ó Maonlaí’s version of “Carrickfergus” captured on video  and also “Cailleach an Airgid” (“The Hag with the Money”), performed by Liam and Peter.

Here are a few photos from the evening.