Writers see value in the moment; they distill a lifetime of frustration or anguish or hope into a brief encounter, in the way Joyce does when Gabriel Conroy realizes at the end of “The Dead” that his wife has always loved someone else.
My cousin is in the traveling company of “Riverdance” and once when she was performing in our area we had dinner. We were talking about how much that show had meant to Irish culture, in the US and worldwide. She said, “Have you ever seen the original dance that was done for the Eurovision contest?” Meaning, the 7-minute interlude in that television program that spawned the show itself. No, we hadn’t. “You should,” she said. “It’s on YouTube.”
And so it is. I’ve watched it a few times since then, and watched it again this morning. It’s amazing. You can feel, as the performance gains momentum, that something really significant is happening. An entire art form (one which we as Irish-American kids saw as quaint and utterly uncool) was being reinvented and made modern. At the same time, Ireland was graduating from a culture that continually gave up its young to immigration to one where the youth of the country was its greatest strength. This all was summed up in that seven minutes.
And then it ends. There’s a brief moment, less than a second, where the audience sits in stunned silence before exploding in cheers. They were there, and they could feel what was happening, what had happened.
