COVER The cover illustration is a reproduction of Dancer from Rita Duffy’s Palimpsest series . The editors of ÉIRE-IRELAND wish to thank Rita Duffy for permission to reproduce the cover painting, Dancing (figure 1), and paintings 1 and 2 from her Doyen series (figure 2). STEPPING OUT: READING RITA DUFFY’S DANCER ADELE DALSIMER AND VERA KREILKAMP Icham of Irlande Aut of the holy londe of Irlande Gode sir, pray ich ye, For of saynte charite, Come and daunce wyt me In Irlande anonymous, 14th century There are two main kinds of Irish dancing: (1) Riverdance, which is now simultaneously running in every major city in the world except Ulan Bator and which some economists believe is responsible for the Irish economic boom; and (2) real Irish dancing, in which men do not wear frilly blouses and you still may not express yourself, except in a written note to the adjudicators. the Irish Times, St Patrick’s Festival Programme, 1998 the fourteen works that make up Rita Duffy’s Palimpsest series of paintings provide a dreamlike epic of the artist’s childhood. The narrative content of Dancer, the image on the cover of this issue, draws the viewer into troubled sites of religious and state pressures on a Catholic child growing up in Northern Ireland. STEPPING OUT: READING RITA DUFFY’S DANCER 208 Dancer depicts a young Irish dancer frozen with apprehension as she begins her steps. She is encased in a restrictive apparatus with the shape of a flat table top. The figure’s immobilized head and upper body appear to be displayed—like the dome of a serving salver—on a lace doily or collar . The girl’s androgynous face is old for her asexual, prepubescent body. Partially surrounded by an orange aura, her medusa-like hair, each strand culminating in a snake’s head, stands on end. Her immobilized arms, tartan -skirted lower body, and bobby-socked legs appear beneath the restricting surface—as do two ball-and-claw feet of a Victorian table. Her rigid feet and body, obscuring the pillar and third foot of the table, form the front edge of a shadow circle created by the table top—a circle suggesting the controlled boundaries of a step dancer’s performance surface. Overhead , at least five toy-sized madonnas or nuns float through the air, propelled by helicopter-like rotors. The carpet at the girl’s feet is decorated with spirals—perhaps alluding to ancient Irish decorative motifs, but more obviously to designs Duffy typically uses to indicate the Axminster carpets of her childhood home. Palimpsest, the title of Rita Duffy’s series of autobiographical paintings, denotes a manuscript in which the original writing has been effaced to make room for new words; the title suggests the artist’s fragmented layering of personal and collective memories of a Catholic girlhood in the North. But “palimpsest” also refers to the technique of drawing, rubbing out, and redrawing that Duffy employed on the wax impregnated paper she used as the canvas for Dancer. Questioned about the ephemeral nature of some imagery in the painting—for example, about figures that are barely visible in the carpet—Duffy explained how she moved elements of the painting from foreground to background as she worked (Interview, 1998). The dreamlike layering of consciousness is thus illuminated and reproduced by a palimpsest technique. The girl in the painting is not dancing for pleasure; her erect hair, stony countenance, and rigid posture all signal a terror she cannot disguise. Dancer as well as the related painting, Dancing (figure 1, page 210), encodes the pressures a young Northern child felt as she participated in rituals enforced by family bonds to the Catholic Church and the Irish state.1 Competitive solo step dancing, promoted as the purest form of Ireland’s dance STEPPING OUT: READING RITA DUFFY’S DANCER 209 1 Duffy explains that her childhood step-dancing classes, held in a Catholic church on the ourtskirts of Belfast, were a consequence of her mother’s desire to affirm an Irish background while raising children in a Protestant area in Northern Ireland (Interview, 1998). STEPPING OUT: READING RITA DUFFY’S DANCER 210 Figure 1. “Dancing...