Trinity Irish Dance comes back to town with the world premiere of Taking the Mick

In British slang, “taking the mickey” means to make fun of someone. And “mick” has long been used as a slur for people of Irish descent. So the title of Trinity Irish Dance Company’s new piece, Taking the Mick, is both a bold reclamation of that slur and a sly nod to the inspiration behind the work: American vaudeville. It makes its world premiere this Sunday as part of Trinity’s annual return to the Auditorium Theatre.

The populist entertainment, though it has roots in late 19th-century France and is a cousin to British music-hall comedy, provided a springboard for artists of all genres (dancers, comedians, acrobats, singers, clowns, etc.), races, and ethnicities to find a toehold on the American dream, while it provided affordable entertainment for families of almost all classes. But that quest for success onstage sometimes came with the price of being expected to embody certain racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Created by company founder and artistic director Mark Howard and associate artistic director Chelsea Hoy, Taking the Mick uses a vaudevillian narrative to create a larger exploration of the Irish in America.

I caught up with Howard and Hoy earlier this week to find out more about the piece and where it fits in the trajectory of the company’s 34-year history. (They were named the best dance troupe in the Readerʼs 2023 Best of Chicago readers’ ballot earlier this month, and the Trinity Academy of Irish Dance, also founded by Howard, was named best dance studio or training program.)

“There are so many layers to this work,” says Hoy, who joined Trinity in 2014 after graduating from Loyola University, and previously collaborated with Howard on 2019’s An Sorcas (The Circus). “There’s multi-movement genres. We’re bending time dimensions going in between early 1900s vaudeville-era narratives. 1970s music from an Irish band called Planxty is just one of the many pieces of music you’ll hear. And it’s all rooted in kind of an implied narrative about social mobility, and one-upmanship, and shifting loyalties; and all of these things that we found through our research were very prevalent through the vaudevillian era, and still seem to be just as prevalent today.”

Trinity Irish Dance Company
Sun 3/3 3 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells, 312-341-2300, auditoriumtheatre.org, $43-$85

She adds, “It’s theatrical in a way that Trinity Irish Dance Company has not ventured to this extent in the past. So we’re really excited to take our audiences in a new direction. It’s a whimsical piece. We’ve been saying ‘whimsy meets percussive ferocity,’ right? So whimsy is a huge part of Irish culture. It was a huge part of Irish immigrants making it in this country.”

Howard, who was born in Yorkshire and grew up in Rogers Park, identifies that blend of whimsy and ferociousness as something he experienced as a youngster taking Irish dance classes. “That juxtaposition, it kind of reflects 1970s Rogers Park. I grew up with this sort of juxtaposition of power and grace that Chelsea and I bring to the stage with the dancers. My upbringing was equal measure violence and beauty. I was learning how to dance, and then also trying to survive wearing a kilt and walking down Albion to get to Saint Ignatius Grammar School on Saint Patrick’s Day and not get pummeled too badly by the brothers that lived across the street.”

He was also a big Monty Python fan, which spurred his love of whimsy. For Taking the Mick, he says, “Chelsea and I have created our own universe of characters that were influenced very much by a combination of Beetlejuice characters, Clockwork Orange, the Joker and the original Batman. We were creating this against the backdrop of Japan, which when you walk through Shibuya and you see all these sort of different arty gangs of kids that are hanging out, it’s like everybody’s creating their own alternative universe.”

Howard trained at the Dennehy School of Irish Dance, where Michael Flatley, Riverdance star and creator of Lord of the Dance, also studied. But Trinity’s founder has resisted the siren call of the big touring spectacle (though Taking the Mick does call on the talents of Michael Curry Design, whose work has been featured on Broadway and in Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show). The company’s mission in part is to “elevate the traditional form of Irish dance, engage in the pursuit of gender equity, and empower through integrity-filled dance experiences and meaningful collaborations.”

In practical terms, that means you won’t find the embroidered costumes and big curly wigs of competitive traditional Irish dance nor the flashy rock-concert aesthetics of Flatley’s franchise. Trinity is a concert dance troupe, like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater or Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, performing what they call “progressive Irish dance.” And they spend a good part of the year on the road—the Auditorium engagement comes after a monthlong tour of Japan (the company’s eighth time there, making them the most toured foreign dance company in Japan’s history).

Howard says, “We’re not interested in mimicry. We want things that have energy in them. If I wanna buy a desk, I don’t want a pressed-wood thing from Ikea. It’s dead to me. I want something that was whittled by some elderly person that I can go visit that can fix that table for me. You know what I mean? So I think Trinity is giving audiences authenticity, and I think that’s a big part of the appeal of these artists—the band, the dancers, all of it. They’re delightfully uninterested in hewing to anybody’s expectations.”

Hoy says, “We’re taking the stereotypes that started to develop of these different groups that made up the vaudevillian stage. They pretty much took advantage of that and cemented their own stereotypes in a way. So the psychology of that is pretty fascinating. And then on the flip side, I think anyone on Sunday could watch Taking the Mick and not even have a clue what the historical background is. It’s just a wildly whimsical, fun, fast-paced dance.”

Bril Barrett Credit: Rachel Neville Studios

Bril Barrett named NEA National Heritage Fellow

Choreographer, dancer, and founder of M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Bril Barrett performed with Trinity Irish Dance back in the 90s and appeared with them last spring at the Auditorium in Rhythms of Resistance. A longtime outspoken advocate and champion of tap dance and its roots in Black American dance traditions, Barrett has been named one of ten 2024 NEA National Heritage Fellows—the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts.

In a 2021 Reader interview with contributor Irene Hsiao, Barrett noted, “Tap has always had this stepcousin-stepbrother-not-quite-in-the-family relationship in the dance world. I just want to keep making the case and trying to garner the respect for the art form I love—not because it’s better but because it’s just as good, just as important, just as relevant.”

The NEA fellowship comes with a $25,000 purse.

Charlique Rolle steps down at Congo Square

On March 1, Charlique Rolle, executive director for Congo Square Theatre, will step down from the role she’s occupied for the last four years in order to focus on her own artistic pursuits. Rolle assumed the Congo Square job in the middle of the 2020 pandemic shutdown and helped bring the company back to live performances, including the world premiere last fall of Inda Craig-Galván’s WELCOME TO MATTESON! In September, Rolle became president of the Black Arts and Culture Alliance of Chicago (previously known as African American Arts Alliance of Chicago).

Rolle is leaving Congo Square on what seems to be a pretty solid financial footing, given that the company is hiring a full-time director of operations and an operations and administrative assistant, in addition to launching a national search to replace Rolle. Artistic director Ericka Ratcliff, who took on that position in 2021, said in a press release announcing Rolle’s departure, “She is a beloved member of our artistic family and her influence on Congo Square will resonate for years to come.”

Congo Square, now entering its 25th anniversary season, presents the late August Wilson’s theatrical memoir, How I Learned What I Learned, in association with Broadway in Chicago, at the Broadway Playhouse April 20–May 5. The show stars onetime Chicago actor and Hollywood veteran Harry Lennix under the direction of former Victory Gardens Theater artistic director Ken-Matt Martin.