Hard, Soft and Danced All Over

Spiritually, if not geographically, San Pedro in July is just about as far from the green hills of Ireland as you can get. The sun-blasted freeway dumps you at a harbor hemmed in by spires and spans and industrial haze. Yes, there are boats and water, which, one could argue, are also found nestled against the Emerald Isle, but most of these boats are moored by cell-phone-wielding landlubbers trying to escape the heat of Torrance (or maybe just Torrance), and the water, well, why get into that? No one else will, after all.

But the Gaelic spirit is hearty and prolific. And, it would seem, drought-resistant, since here in San Pedro on this Smaug-breath of a day, dwells Annee Albritton, one of the country’s top Irish dancers. She’s a local hybrid--her father Irish American, her mother Latina--with very green eyes and golden skin dusted with freckles like a sprinkling of cinnamon. If she stands to 5 feet she is probably on her tiptoes.

Which she often is: back ramrod straight, arms stiff, fists frozen pendulums against her hips, while her feet and her legs slide and leap and arch and hop, moving her still torso across the stage, around the room, bouncing and twirling it through jigs and reels. If you can’t make it to her mother’s house, where she practices on a homemade stage in the back room for at least two hours a day, you can watch her perform on Friday at the Luckman Theatre at Cal State L.A. and on July 27 at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre as part of Dance Kaleidoscope 1996.

“I went to an Irish fair when I was 8,” Albritton says. “I watched the dancers, and there was something just magical about it. I had never danced before, but my parents enrolled me in a school [Kelly School of Dance in Los Angeles], and since then the dance has been like my best friend. I just can’t stop.”

She’s 24, born and raised in Southern California, so she comes pretty close to adding “literally” at the end of her sentence, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate. She has a wide background in choreography and dance--jazz, tap, modern--and is currently taking a break from getting her master’s degree in it at UCLA.

Dance is what she does, and Irish dance is what she does most. Like a feminist revision of the Girl With the Red Shoes, Albritton is compelled to dance, by joy, yes, but also by a very vivid sense of competition: Irish dance is a sport as much as an art form and is fiercely competitive, on that side of the Atlantic and this.

In her 14 years of competitive dancing, Albritton has won the Western U.S. Championships, the Southern U.S. Championships and the California and Arizona championships. She has also qualified for the world championships 12 times, placing as high as 20th out of 350 competitors.

“I love to compete,” she says. “That’s probably why I love Irish dance so much. In a lot of ways, it’s not nearly as expressive as modern or jazz, where you can show whatever mood you want. In the Irish dance, you are supposed to represent the dance, to be the Irish Dancer, very respectful, very controlled. You can’t use your hands; you have to keep your upper body so still, your face calm. I smile sometimes,” she says, doing so, “but lots of other dancers don’t.”

She tells a story of how the controlled carriage came into being, about how, before the Irish Republic gained independence in 1921, it was against British law to do anything Irish, including dance: “The girls would stand behind walls so all the British soldiers could see was from their waists up, and they would dance, right in front of the soldiers, but the soldiers couldn’t tell because they couldn’t see their feet.”

There are two kinds of Irish dance--hard and soft, categorized by the type of shoe the dancer wears. The soft shoes, gillies, look like ballet shoes with crisscrosses over the top of the foot. The hard shoes are plain black leather with solid heels. (Until a few years ago, nails were pounded into the tips and soles to add a distinct staccato stomp to the dance, but, Albritton says, dancers have since switched to fiberglass inserts, a vast improvement since “the old shoes weighed like 5 or 6 pounds. Each. I mean, they were heavy.”)

The soft dances are the reel, the slip jig, the hop jig and the light jig; the hard dances are the hard jig, the horn pipe, the treble reel and set dances. In the Dance Kaleidoscope series, Albritton will perform the treble reel and a set dance. For competitions, dancers usually perform one hard and one soft, but the most important is the set dance, which allows the dancer a bit more freedom to choreograph and invent.

“In the last three or four years, there have been a lot of changes,” Albritton says. “The costumes have more colors, people are adding tap and modern moves, and, of course, everyone is copying ‘Riverdance.’ ”

“Riverdance,” the hit Irish song-and-dance revue that arrives at the Pantages Theatre in November, includes a bring-down-the-house rendition of the treble reel. The show is the splashiest example of the boom in all things Celtic. Albritton imagines that it will send many children and their parents rifling through the Yellow Pages looking for “Dance Schools, Ethnic.”

“Already I see these really tiny kids, like 4 or 5, and they’re doing things that I’m doing,” she says. To teach the youngsters, instructors put a green shoe on one foot, a red shoe on the other, and create the steps out of color combinations.

“It’s the only way little kids can learn,” Albritton says. “And Irish dance isn’t usually taught verbally anyway. There isn’t a lot of terminology. Teachers usually show you or move you through a dance first. I had one teacher who taught me by sound, by singing the dance, but we had worked together a long time.”

There is so much emphasis on youth in Irish dance that Albritton, at the ripe old age of 24, is already being pressured to retire.

“For a dancer, 30 is really, really old,” she says. “The idea is that you should concentrate on teaching, on passing on the dance. But I’m not done yet. I still want to compete.” Her tone clears the youthful bubbles and perkiness and moves to an altitude where the air is a little thinner, the motive a little sharper.

Just west of the harbor is Albritton’s mother’s house, where Albritton lived until recently. The eyes take their time adjusting to the dim cool interior, to that and the sight of kingdoms, large and small, that shine in the brown shade of the living room. Trophies, hundreds of them, grouped like medieval cities, on table and shelf, sideboard and floor. Big trophies, little trophies, crowned with winged angels and dancing girls. Third place, first place, national champion, they are everywhere.

Albritton’s mother comes out from the kitchen and stands among the towers of gold and silver. “We don’t have enough room,” she says in proud apology, “she just keeps winning.”

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ANNEE ALBRITTON/DANCE KALEIDOSCOPE 1996, Luckman Fine Arts Center, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, and John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. E., Hollywood. Dates: Friday, 8 p.m. (Luckman) ; July 27, 10 a.m. (Ford) . Prices: $12-$18. Phone: (213) 480-3232 (Luckman) ; (213) 466-1767 (Ford) .