Although movement is often viewed as forming the ‘kinetic basis’ of the modern age, the analysis of movement practices such as dance is often neglected in theories of modernity. Dance theorists such as André Lepecki (2006) and Randy Martin (1998) have argued for an awareness of how the kinaesthetic politics of modernity perform a colonization of space and bodies in their constant drive toward movement and mobility. This chapter examines how an analysis of two dance works by Irish artists, one from the early twentieth century and one from the early twenty-first century, can contribute to these discussions of modernity and dance, and how the works might illuminate connections between dance and politics in Ireland in their alternative approaches to these modernist kinaesthetic politics. Taking a brief, contextualizing look at an early dance play by William Butler Yeats, the chapter then focuses on what echoes, or afterlives, can be found from this early modernist work in a piece by contemporary dance theatre choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir. In both works we see the ability of dance to create an alternative space within the pervading discourses (or movements) of a sociopolitical and cultural landscape that allows the spectator – through a visceral connection with a dancer – to experience a different perspective on the ‘idea of a nation’.

In his revisionary study of modern dance, Mark Franko argues that modernist accounts of modern dance history, ‘perform the telos of aesthetic modernism itself: a continuous reduction to essentials culminating in irreducible “qualities” ’. In this chapter's discussion of what ‘afterlives’ a modernist dance piece in Ireland might have in the work of a contemporary Irish choreography, there can be no danger of such reductions being performed, as the (very) few examples of historical modern dance to be found are so thoroughly different from each other from a formalist perspective. However, this discussion does attempt to find echoes from a modernist work from the early twentieth century in a contemporary dance theatre piece – not from a formalist perspective, but through an examination of how these works engage in a ‘modernist cultural politics’.