From Ann's Place to Webfeis
The internet now looks and functions a lot differently than the internet of twenty or more years ago, but this isn't an essay about the corporate, monetized world we're now used to. We all know it.
This is about dot com era.
We used to be really excited about making websites, and making websites was a substitution for what we didn’t really have yet: social media. Websites served as a meeting place, as a form of social currency. We would interact with each other through email and guestbooks and webrings and message boards, and instant messenger when we really got friendly. We all had a little diary of our day or our dance, a precursor to everything that came after.
For Irish dance this was especially exciting because the community was still riding high on the wave of the Riverdance/Lord of the Dance zeitgeist. The Irish dance world had just been cracked open to the masses, and was now a mix of pre-Riverdance teens and adults, and the post-Riverdance beginners.
The online Irish dance world reflected this sea change. Many of the most active websites were run by people who started Irish dance because of or after Riverdance, and they made good, earnest efforts to explain all of the nuances of the dance to a rapidly growing audience. And Irish dance schools got in on it, making websites for the first time.
It was an era of a tiny internet and an earnest love of frame layouts, guestbooks, and webrings.
I discovered the Irish dance online world because I was one of those kids who, when they got interested in something, had to know everything about it. Before the internet, it was trips to the library and coming home with stacks of books. After the internet, it was devouring every website I could find, collecting the information, printing the information, and making my own site to share what I now knew. It was also a way of being a part of the wider community of Irish dance, and of making even a tiny mark on it.
I was personally invested in all of the dance diaries. I would read them obsessively, trying to get an idea of what other lessons and other schools were like. Trying to judge my progress by theirs.
Though Irish dance was growing in popularity outside of Ireland and the diaspora, it was (and in many cases still is) a relatively small dance community. I didn't often see the friends I danced with except in class, and those were the only Irish dancers around, so having others to talk to and be inspired by was a bonus.
Most of the old sites are gone, or so badly broken that they are but a husk of What Used to Be. A lot were hosted by GeoCities and thus have been sucked into the void once thought impossible: gone from the internet (unless captured by the Wayback Machine).
We even lost the two motherships of Irish dance information on the internet, Ashley Middleton’s Diochra.com, and Ann's Place. However, Ashe is still firmly entrenched in Irish dance, so at least we haven’t lost her where it counts most.
As blogging became more of an institution, a lot of the hand-coded sites began to go into stasis as they jumped to easier platforms. Webrings and awards that helped foster interaction were now defunct. Many of the most active dancers retired or quit or just grew out of being online all the time. And so it was that the Golden Age of Irish Dance (Websites) saw its twilight.
Below are many of the major players as captured in 2019. Some are still live, but frozen in time. Others were only found using the Wayback Machine. A few have disappeared completely (cheers to you, Clickyfeet).
