2 step dance / fiddle / dance anthropology
Danielle began life in ballet and modern dance, she spent her youth Irish step-dancing and fiddling, in her late adolescence she was introduced to sean-nós and regional styles of step dance from Ireland and North America, her twenties were spent researching and writing about historical and cultural paradigms of dance traditions in Ireland and its relationship to European and North American dance forms, and so far her 30s have led her to reconnect and reclaim the Métis and Quebecois traditions of her grandparents.
Danielle's breadth and depth of experience and cultural connections is unique in the traditional music world. She is an Irish dancer with extensive experience in the competitive, old-style, and sean-nós dance worlds with direct connections to the old dancing master lineages of Cork and Kerry, and with experience in the dance traditions of the north of Ireland, all places she has lived and spent significant time. Danielle is one of few ethnochoreologists (dance anthropologists) to have completed a two-year master's degree focused solely on research and thesis, her official area of study included County Cork and ties to early European dance trends, other regions in Ireland, and traditions in North America. As a fiddler she grew up immersed in Irish music with notable teachers and mentors in the US, Ireland, and Canada. Danielle holds a Diploma in Traditional Irish Music from University College Cork where she studied with Connie O'Connell, Matt Cranitch, Bobby Gardiner, and Peggy McTeggart.
fiddle • fidil • aen vyayloon • kitohcikan
Recently, Danielle has begun to connect to the Canadian and Indigenous dance and fiddle styles her grandmother and grandfather grew up with. Danielle has studied the gigue (step dance) traditions of her great grandparents in Jonquiere, in Northern Quebec, with Pierre Chartrand and Normand Legault. Thanks to her relatives, Métis dancers, emerging elders and knowledge holders, jiggers, and fiddlers, Danielle has begun to reconnect to her Grandfather's Métis culture of St. Francois Xavier and Portage La Prairie in Manitoba. She descends from Bois Brûlés who fought beside Cuthbert Grant in the Victory of Frog Plain, is in the Métis citizenship process with the Manitoba Métis Nation, and is learning the importance of reclaiming her family's Métis/Michif/Otipemisiwak identity. "Un femme Michif pii esqueo Otipemisiwak nee ah". Danielle's history, language, dance, and fiddle teachers and influences include her great-aunts Narda Nadon and Darlene Schley, Yvonne Chartrand (V'ni Dansi), Joseph Naytowhow, Madelaine McCallum, Patty Kusturok, and Natalie Pepin (The Gabriel Dumont Institute).
Awkward but social