Added on Sunday 30 Sep 2012

I was very privileged and fotunate to be able to be able to talk and interview a terrific Irirsh-American dancer, Darrah Carr! Darrah Carr originall from Toledo Ohio, has taken dance to a whole new level, coining her style ModERIN! She has taken Irish and modern dance and gave it a bit of a twist and turned it into something turly amazing! In my interview Darrah gives us an inside look into the world of dance and her passion for it!!! I'd like to thank Darrah for taking the time to let me interview her as well,thank you so much Darrah!! So please check out Darrah Carr and crew at www.darrahcarrdance.com. You can also help out Darrah Carr Dance, they have a, 501(c)3 non-for-profit organization, so if anybody wishes to support our work through a financial contribution they can do so! The information is at www.darrahcarrdance.com!

(Helen) So how long have you been dancing!!

(Darrah) Over 25 years, since I was six!

(Helen) Have you always had a passion for dancing and who influenced you the most?

(Darrah) Oh, most definitely! I always loved dancing, even when I was a very little young girl. I use to beg for dance lessons. And my mother(I had three sisters), my mother started my older sisters in ballet classes when they where young and found that it was just very slow. The music was slow and it just wasn't exciting,so they quit. My mom was afraid that if she started me in ballet to young, because ballet takes a lot of discipline and control, and for very young active children that may not be the best chose to start off with. So she was afrid that if I started in ballet I would lose my passion for dance. So she saw an ad in our paper for Irish dance lessons and thought that was perfect and a way to get interested in dance and express our Irish heritege, my family is Irish-American on both sides, and it's a bit more lively and fun music, and it may be better suited for(laughing) an active child. So she started me in Irish dance lessons along with my three sisters and we all did it together for a number of years. They eventually persued other activities and I continued in irish dance and eventually began ballet dancing as well when I was eight.

(Helen) So in your opinion can you learn dance at any age or is there a certain age where you have to start?

(Darrah) Well I think there are different styles of Irish dancers, the irish step dance, competitive form, so that style is probably easist to learn at a younger age, by a younger person, at least 13 up to early 20's, it's very athletic, very fast pace involves a lot of jumps,turns,leeps, something like you would see in Riverdance for example. And that style I think is better suited to learning at a younger age. However, I have taught a number of adult classes and a range of all ages, an adult activity, it fun, it's great exercise, a great way to be social, and help form friendships. In those classes I tend to address more of the social style of Irish dance called step dance or ceili dance. It's not quite as athletic, it certainly involves complicated foot work, it's dancing in patterns and in groups, formations, it's sort of a percursor of American square dance, and thats a form that I think for any age is well suited for, the more social form of Irish dance.

(Helen) So through the years you've been dancing have you learned anything about yourself, anything new?

(Darrah) I love to perform, I love to entertain, I love connecting with the audiance. Its really just a wonder energy and excitement, and thats really the driving force behind my pursuit of a career in Irish dance. I learned that i'm quite disiplined and focused. I think a lot of making a carrer in the art you have to be pretty entrepreneurial(laughing), and pretty determined. Especially in dance there's not a huge audiance,there's not a lot of government funding, so you really have to be pretty determind and passionate about it to continue to follow a dance career. I've also learned I love all aspects of dance, I divide my time between performing and choreographing for my company "Darrah Carr Dance", I also do some freelace writing for a number of dance publications, and I teach dance. So I think I have a multifaceted career in dance, which I really enjoy, different activities of performance, choreography, teaching and writing. Bring out different aspects and different interest for me, a way I can devolop a career in the field while pursuing a varitety of thing all in the dance field.

(Helen) So this is kind of like a dream come true then?

(Darrah) It's definitely something I wanted to do. When I was young I always use to think wanted to live in New York City and have a dance company, so definitely. I know I always wanted to move to New York upon graduation from college, there's so much I love about the city it's self seperate from dance. So it's something I wanted(been interested in) since childhood was to perform and choreograph and direct a company.

(Helen) What are some of the challenges you face as a dancer/performer?

(Darrah) One of them is I think just driving in audience for dance. I think people are much more inclined to go to sports events or theatre or music. I find that dance over all has a fairly small audience. One thing I'm very passionate about is trying to build, increase that audience, and engage in community out reach and an art education program that will educate people about the art of dance, and further interest in it. Another thing is that for my company, we specialize in what I call ModERIN, which is a blend of traditional Irish dance and contemporary modern dance, it's sort of a blended or fused form, we draw from two different dance styles and combined them together. So we often have a hard time figuring out where we fit. Do we fit in the Irish dance world or do we fit in the modern dance world, I would say we brigde both worlds, so we just try to find that common ground between the two different dance forms. And that can be a challege too, we also don't look like a typical Irish dance school or Irish dance show, and yet with the Irish we also don't look like a typical modern dance company either.

(Helen) You've coined your dance style ModERIN. What gave you the idea for the name?

(Darrah) As I mentioned, I started irish dance when I was very young and then eventually began ballet from age eight. And in college I took modern dance, which was so liberating and so free, after years of Irish dance compitions and vigoruos classical ballet training I was really sort of burned out from competing and having to maintain a really low body weight from ballet, so modern dance gave this wonderful free art form. You could move your arms and your torso, you could go down to the floor, you could partner with people, and it sort of offered other possibilities. So when I moved to New York City and began to choreograph and eventually recieve my MFA at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, I began to experiment with combinding modern dance and Irish dance. And drawing on structures of Irish dance, the way I see it is Irish dance has so many spacial patterns, you can say the social dances, such as ceili dances. Lots of spacial designs that can be used as templates for moving dancers through space, looking at some of the Irish dance spacial patterns, the structure of the rythems of the foot work, the structure of the music, and taking some of those structures and then taking the freedom of modern dance, the freedom to move your arms and your torso, to go down to the floor, to partner with other dancers and try to find a style that draws on both the Irish dance srtucture and the modern dance style. Kind of the way I would combind those two. And the term ModERIN it just sort of came from brain storming, it's just a compound word to summorize the essence of what I'm trying to do. So modern dance and Erin is a reference to Ireland. So rather then just being modern dance, its ModERIN.

(Helen) You've presented your research findings at conferences of the Congress on Research in Dance, can you tell a little of what you found and did any of it surprise you?

(Darrah) Yah, it was really interesting research! It started off with a Davenport Grant I recieved to go to Ireland and do some research on the history of Irish dance.and growing up an Irish step dancer and in the competition curcit I was totally unaware of the vast world of dancing and sean-nos, or old style step dancing. So it was really interesting. And so i went to Ireland interview step dancers and old time sean-nos dancers, and find out about these totally different styles of Irish dance styles that I was unaware of. And I think it's just a fascinating art form, because it's just the only dance form I can think of where you don't move your arms and the legs are moving rapidly. It also has both the hard shoe and the soft shoe componets, and it exist in these different contexts of social behavior, community participation, in terms of step dancing style, really highly athletic competition style of Irish dance. And of course more recently in the last 15 years the international phenomenon Riverdance. So it was interesting to look of this, what we call Irish dance incompasses so many kinds of styles and how they have so many different functions, weather it's social behavior, competitve sports, or international performance, looking at how the dance form itself changes. I was also really interested to learn about the gaelic revival and how Irish dance played a roll in promoting a sence of national identity. And looking at how the costumes and competitive Irish dance compiled from celtic symbols are ment to inspire a since of pride and national identity. And I found that Irish Set dancing specifically was banned for a period of time, it was considered to be forign or non-native. Irish dance,ceili dance, and Irish Set dancing where promoted as being Irish, Irish Set dancing was banned and went into decline for a number of years, until the set dancing revival of the 1980's.

(Helen) What would you say are some of your greatest accomplishments?

(Darrah) My dance company, Darrah Carr Dance, recently celebrated our 10th anniversary last year with a season st New York City's Art's Center. And that was definitly an accomplishment to hit the milesone of 10 years and maintaing a dance company. And also a lot of exciting performances, to dance on the Today Show,at New York City's Irish Art's Center, to tour Ireland, so we've had a number of highlights We've worked with a number of incredible musicians along the way, including Mick Moloney,Athena Tergis,Alundra,Billy McComiskey,Solas,Tony DeMarco,Buddy Connolly,Andy Cooney and his band,Padraig Allen,Christel Rice,Shane O'Sullivan,Celeste Ray,and Conor McGuirk to name a few....
We've really had a number of accomplishments.

(Helen) I hear you got to dance on the set of the Guru, starring Heather Gramham, what was that like?

(Darah) Oh that was alot of fun, very interesting! It's amazing how long it takes to film 15 seconds, 30 seconds of a movie.Very fascinating process, particulary for me, particulay as a choreographer, we certainly work maticulously, escpacilly in rehearsal. But once you go and perform it live on stage, anything can happen. It certainly isn't going to be the same the next time around. So it's interesting to look at the film world and see how exacting andhow percise, they'll do a take over and over and over again to get it exactly right to ensure thats exactly how they want it to be. It's a very different way of working then in live performance, where when your on stage your never exactly sure just how it's going to go. You know, you don't get a chance to do a, take two(laughing). S it was really interesting to see that. The amount of detail and attention.

(Helen) Do you have any humorous stories from anything that happened, say, on tour or during rehearsals?

(Darrah) I always suppose the when I retire I'm going to write a book called "Whirly Gig's", about all the funny gig's that my dancers and I have done. On of the ones I can think of, we where invited to the opening of a Crispy Creme donuts store, myself and Niall O'Leary, who is a guest artist with Darrah Carr Dance, we've done a duet act together for many years, and the two of us where invited to dance at the opening of this Crispy Creme's donut store and we had to be there at 4:30 in the morning and they had us jumping over Cripy Creme donut boxes that where pilled about six or seven boxes together, we had to leap over them holding hands while the channel 7 weather report was giving the weather behind the counter of the donut scene, donut store and customers are coming in and out of the buying their coffee it was really kind of strange(laughing)! But it's always one that I think of as a funny gig story.

(Helen) That,that is different I must admit(both of us laughing)
So what do you do to unwind? What do you do to relax? Do you have any hobbies or anything?

(Darrah) I love to cook. Thats on thing that i really like, that i find extemely relaxing. And it's really creative. I love to cook recipes or making up my own.Thats definitely a source of unwinding for me.

(Helen) So do you have a favorite food or dessert you like to cook?

(Darrah) I love to make mushroom soup! That is one of my specialties. And I love to make all sorts of pasta dishes, chicken and pasta, yah.

(Helen) Do you have any advise for anyone who wants to go into dancing or is staring out in dancing?

(Darrah) I would say, just try everything. You know, try every opportunity that comes along, you never know where it might lead or what door might open for you. So when you start out maintain a really open and positive attitude. And just jump in, try every opportunity..tirelessly I would say.

(Helen) What can poeple do to help or contribute to Darrah Carr Dance?

(Darrah) Well we have a, 501(c)3 non-for-profit organization, so if anybody wishes to support our work through a financial contribution they can do so, that would be a tax deduction. And there is information where to send that on our website. And that would certainly be greatly appreciated. We really a lot on individual donations, and generous supporters, to be able to continue our work. it's a crucial gap betwwen the earned income we have from performing and any government foundation grant. So we really are very greatful to individual donors. And certainly we're always looking for volenteers as well, the gift of time is extremely valuable.There's a huge list of things to do, if anyone was so inclined. And you can certainly visit our website,all of our contact information, is on the website, at darrahcarrdance.com. There is a lot to explore and find out about what we do and about our ModERIN concept.

(Helen) Any tours coming up?

(Darrah) Yah, at the moment the company is touring wth Andy Cooney and his band, in The magic of Christmas performance. And that runs through this weekend into early next week. And we'll be joining Andy Conney again in March for 3 weeks of touring, and heading out to the southwest, southeast and then around the New York City, greater area.And that information will be posted on our website as well.

(Helen) And last question, any plans for the holidays?

(Darrah) Really just to hang here in New York. One of my favorite things is to go see the tree in Rockafeller Center, that is a definite tradition, and just send time with friends and family. Not really traveling at the moment. I'm doing my last tour performance this evening and then just looking forward to hibernating a bit as well during the holiday.