Overview

What does it mean to feel impact in dance? In Feeling Impact: A Timedancer's Study of Irish Step Dance, Dr Russell Patrick Brown reimagines Irish step dance through the felt intelligence of the body. Moving beyond the dazzling speed of footwork and the familiar sound of hard shoes striking the floor, this groundbreaking study explores how dancers experience impact as vibration, resonance, pressure and even pain-and how those sensations carry memory, identity and history. Drawing on practice-based research, queer and disabled embodiment, and comparative work with Flamenco, Tap and Ballet Folklórico, Brown develops a radical new framework for understanding Irish step dance as an embodied archive. Here, impact is not only technique or spectacle: it is a language of survival, a rhythm of resistance and a politics of feeling. Two original performance case studies, The Querist (2017) and AngelAI (2023), illustrate this impact-driven approach in motion, while personal reflections from Brown's position as a queer, Romani, disabled artist-scholar illuminate the intersections of race, ability and cultural identity within global dance practice. Written in vivid, accessible prose, ""Feeling Impact"" expands the conversation on Irish step dance, percussive forms, and decolonial performance. For dancers, choreographers, scholars, and anyone drawn to the somatic or spiritual dimensions of art, this book offers a bold invitation: to sense the world through impact, and to dance time itself differently.

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9798218825201

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Reviews

""A compelling and original contribution to dance studies, Feeling Impact explores 'impact-driven dance' as a mode of intimate violence and creation. Brown asks urgent questions of practice, memory, culture, and trauma, rendering dance a relational field of force mobilized through history. A marvelous, groundbreaking work."" - Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz, Northwestern University ""Brown offers a bold rethinking of dance as a site of creation, destruction, and undoing. This book moves across memory, trauma, kinship, and performance with rare insight, proposing impact as a vital vector for artistic and historical inquiry. A transformative, deeply intelligent contribution to contemporary dance research."" - Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz, Northwestern University ""A revolutionary and beautifully written study of Irish step dance. Brown blends somatic insight, personal narrative, and academic rigor to introduce entirely new ways of knowing in percussive dance. Profound, compassionate, and methodologically innovative - a model for future arts practice research."" - Dr. Breandán de Gallaí, Irish World Academy / Ériu Dance Company ""Feisty, vulnerable, angry, loving - and dazzling. Brown registers the violent impact of colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal systems on Irish dance and reveals the magic, intuition, and somatic knowledge that endure. A provocative, brilliant intellectual tour-de-force."" - Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, UC Riverside

Author Information

Dr. Russell Patrick Brown is a Romani dance writer, artist-scholar, and technologist whose work explores how rhythm, embodiment, and cultural memory shape human experience. A queer and disabled practitioner trained in Irish step dance, Flamenco, and somatic practices, he develops impact-driven approaches to movement that center the felt intelligence of the body. Brown holds a PhD in Dance from the University of Limerick, an MA from New York University, and a BA in Music. His research and performance practice weave together ethnography, decolonial theory, and Romani epistemologies to reimagine dance as an embodied archive of survival, identity, and resistance.

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