Doug Plummer, Photo Motion

I’m less than a month out from my first return to Ireland in 22 years. The occasion is a set of connections, made possible only by social media, that is concluding with a donation of my photographs to the National Dance Archive of Ireland at the University of Limerick.

25 years ago I was deep into a personal project, documenting the music, dance and landscape of Ireland and visually making connections between all three. I made seven trips there in the space of 4 years. I had one guidebook assignment that took me all over the country, but otherwise this was a self-funded project of passion.

The music captivated me. I wanted to be inside it. I would be on the front edge of the session, making small talk and photographing the music and the musicians. I saw a group of folks form an impromptu dance set in the pub, and so I learned to set dance and became a participant-observer-documentarian of that scene.

I was chasing a book. I went to book fairs to better understand the terrain. I showed the work at photo reviews and started working with a book packager. Together we came up with a gorgeous sequence of rhythm and depth, and we started shopping the project around. There were nibbles from publishers.

Then 9/11. That took the wind out of the sails of the Ireland project, and pretty much my entire business. I had several dry years before I was shooting full time again, but I turned my back on this body of work, and, truthfully, much attention to personal fine art photography of any kind. Before long the darkroom became the laundry room.

A couple years ago an Irish Dance Studies researcher found a post of mine on Facebook, connected me with a colleague at Limerick, and it turns out I appear to have a significant archive for the ethnochoreology crowd. I’m taking a set of exhibit prints with me to give them, and to see if this can lead to anything more.

Maybe I can wake up this body of work and give it a new life.

The opening page of the Contradance Calendar has an essay I wrote, adapted from a Facebook post from several months ago. It reads as follows:

When I went to a dance in the spring of 2022, after two years away, I was unprepared for the waves of emotion that would sweep me. That first circle left, that first swing, that first allemande. I'm holding other people in my arms for the first time in two years and I'm looking into their eyes, inches away from mine. I am feeling like I haven't felt in ages. And those feelings are building up. The tears that are about to fall are the first fat raindrops on a parched desert, and I had no idea I was this thirsty for connection. My dance partner is a woman I've known for years, and I feel completely safe with her. At the end of the dance we hug and she holds me tight and I sob and sob into her shoulder.

Many of us are having some version of that experience as dancing begins to reemerge. We learned by its absence how important connection and safe, social touch is to our existence. Some of us have been dancing for much of our lives, and we probably took for granted that this would always be available to us. That's not true, we know now, and it never was. Community takes nurturing and attention, volunteers and organizers, physical infrastructure and, now more than ever, tolerance.

It feels like an auspicious moment to celebrate music and dance again. For six years, between 2012 and 2017, I published the best photos I'd taken of dances the prior year, with an emphasis on highlighting the geographical diversity of our tradition. There is no “prior year” of dance this time, so I'm digging into the archives and publishing the best of the last 15 years of dance and music photographs.

Support your local dance. Support the regional and national groups that help local dance and music communities thrive. I'm thinking of CDSS as the preeminent organization that does so much to help local groups with resources and information, but it's not the only one. Get involved, and the best way to start is to go out and dance.

Order one here: https://todayisawphoto.com/